THE GLORIOUS 
GOSPEL 



\DAM KENNEDY ADCOCK.M.A 




\ 



Class 

Book.. 



cjdpxright depose 



THE GLORIOUS 
GOSPEL 

The Center of Christianity 



BY 

ADAM KENNEDY ADGOGK, M.A. 




CINCINNATI 

The Standard Publishing Company 



Copyright, 1916 
The Standard Publishing Company 



ST77 

■Mi, 



t 



,e 



JAN -4 1917 

©CIA453534 



DEDICATION 

T^O his father and mother, William Taylor and 
Mahala Archer Adcock, now gone to their 
eternal reward, who led his feet from infancy 
in the way of the Lord; to his sister, Louretta 
Adcock, whose beautiful life of twenty summers 
charms him more and more as he goes on to 
join her in the heavenly clime; to his grand- 
father, John Adcock, a farmer preacher of 
sainted memory, who taught him to memorize 
the Word of God; to Prof. E. R. Cate, Thorn 
Grove, Tennessee, who laid the foundation for 
his education in the village school; to S. S. 
Lappin, editor of the Christian Standard, Cin- 
cinnati, Ohio, who has encouraged him to write; 
to the churches that have honored him with 
their trust ; and to all who love the glorious gos- 
pel, the center of Christianity, this volume is 
gratefully and affectionately inscribed by 

The Author. 



CROSS 



ft 

SALVATION' 



TH£ABlt>tfi/'&Pf(/t/eJHes 



or 

CHRIST 



THECHI{lsriAKl1Et10WLS 



I FHg- CHUTjCH 



THEREAT COMMISSION 



THE- ATOSTLES | 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



JESUS or NAZARETH 



THE- GOSPEL 



-SIM 



LAW 



JjELIGiorZ 



THE DISPELS ATI ONS 



THE TESTAMENTS 



THE BIBLE: 



TH? FUNDAMENTALS QF CHflSTlAWTY 



2 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

'"THIS work is the product of much 
* direct study of the Bible, especially 
of the New Testament. No pains have 
been spared in its development. It added 
much to the labor of the writer, but more 
to his joy, and he wishes the reader as 
much pleasure in its perusal as came to 
him in its creation. Let us go reverently 
into the depths of the glorious gospel and 
rejoice together in the liberty of the truth 
of the Son of God. 

This treatise endeavors to approach 
the New Testament scientifically — not 
merely in the light of a few favorite 
texts, but rather in the blaze of the whole 
body of the Scriptures. The author has 
memorized most of the New Testament, 
and has striven so to understand Chris- 
tianity that he might be able to show 
something of its simplicity and profundity 
and glory. His paramount desire is to 
be true to the doctrine of Jesus Christ and 
to the teaching of His Apostles, for here 
theory and practice clasp hands, and life 
and principle are indissoluble. And no 
one should be moved by the adverse criti- 
cism, however pretentious its claim, that 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 



neutralizes the Bible or subverts the 
Scriptures. 

This book is devoted to funda- 
mentals. It seeks to reflect the truth of 
the New Testament and reason, and to 
show their agreement. As we sail mid- 
stream we cannot tarry with the beautiful 
scenery by the shore. But we glimpse 
the wide country and hear the singing 
birds as we go on our voyage, and with 
the divine plummet we sound the river of 
time as it carries us into the sea of 
eternity. The subjects we have chosen are 
parts of a whole and together form a unit, 
as illustrated on page 4. Of course, 
such themes are inexhaustible. But we 
hope these pages may be suggestive. 

The reader will find the references 
relevant and luminous. The paragraph 
heads comprehend the subject-matter for 
convenience, and the contents and the in- 
dex place the treatment of any topic at 
immediate command. And the introduc- 
tion draws a broad line for the chapters 
that follow. 

We hope this volume may be valuable 
both for reading and for reference, both 
in the study and in the classroom. 

Adam K. Adcock. 

Duquoin, Ills. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction 13-25 

Christ the Only Foundation; Likeness De- 
mands Union; Religion Natural and Super- 
natural; Religion Objective and Subjective; 
The Supremacy of Jesus ; Primary Themes ; 
Vitality of the New Testament; Doctrine 
and Life; Sin as an Obstacle; How Over- 
come; The Triangles of Life; The Author- 
ity of Truth; The First Need of Men. 

I. 

The Bible 27-39 

Importance of the Bible; The Fidelity of 
the Bible; The Bible the Greatest Classic; 
The Bible a Library; A Divine Human 
Production; The Word of God and Source 
of All Good; Sufficient unto Human Need; 
And Mastery of the World; Supremely 
Religious ; Illustrated and Incarnated ; The 
Bible Is Infinite; Universal and Final; 
Complete Guide for This World; And 
Leads the Finite to the Infinite. 

II. 

The Testaments 40-52 

The Hemispheres of the Bible; God's Con- 
tracts with Men; The Center of the Old 
Testament; Why We Have the New Testa- 
ment; The Superiority of the New Testa- 
ment; Moses Mediator of the Old, Christ 
of the New; The Difference in Their Con- 
tents; The Old, Local, Temporary; The 
New, Universal, Permanent; Contrast of 
Their Beginnings; Contrast of Their De- 
velopment; Contrast of Their Conclusion; 
Their Mutual Corroboration ; The Old Tes- 
tament Not Authoritative Now. 
7 



CONTENTS 



III. PAGE 

The Dispensations 53-66 

Divine Dealing with Man Originally Direct; 
Simplicity of the Patriarchal Dispensation; 
The Patriarch the Natural Leader; The 
Adequacy of the Patriarchal Dispensation; 
Where It Broke Down; How Jehovah 
Saved His Cause; The Jewish Dispensa- 
tion Enlargement of the Patriarchal; The 
Germ of the Jewish and the Christian Dis- 
pensation in the Promise to Abraham ; How 
God Enlarged His Dispensation; The First 
Two Dispensations Symbolized the Third; 
The Vehicle of Thought Common to the 
Dispensations; Time Limit of Each Dis- 
pensation ; Salvation Fully Wrought Out in 
Christ; The Outlook for the Future. 

IV. 

Religion 67-79 

Religion the Fundamental Purpose of the 
Bible; The Primary Elements of Religion; 
The Superiority of Christianity over Other 
Religions ; Simple Embodiment of Chris- 
tian Principles ; James' Definition of Re- 
ligion; Religion Conserves Life and Equal- 
izes Men; Religion Counteracts Tempta- 
tion; Because It Develops Self-mastery; 
Religion the Dominant Element in Life; 
And Will Make Everything Sacred and 
Nothing Secular. 

V. 

The Law 80-93 

Definition and Attributes of Law; The 
Necessity and the Dependence of Law; 
Law Is the Will of God, Inherent and Mer- 
ciful; God Revealed His Law as Man's 
Well-being Demanded; The Law of Moses 
Is also Adapted to Israel; And Surren- 
dered Authority in Its Fulfillment; It Was 
Educative, but Seriously Limited; Contrast 
of the Law and the Gospel; The Gospel 
the Supreme Law of Life; Jesus the Master 



CONTENTS 



of All Law; The Gospel the Only Guaran- 
tee of Freedom; Love the Only Safeguard 
of Life and Happiness. 

VI. 

Sin 94-107 

Sin Is the Blight of the World ; The Origin 
of Sin; Heaven and Hell Defined by Con- 
trast; The Actuality of the Devil; "The 
Works of the Devil"; Hell as Spiritual 
Doom Imaged by Physical Suffering; The 
Specific Cure for the Disease of Sin ; Symp- 
toms of the Disease of Sin; Sin Always 
Manacled to the Devil, Its Begetter; The 
Flesh Enthralled by Sin; The Only Abso- 
lute Victory over Sin; The Deadly Conflict 
of Sin; Lawless, Sin Slays Its Victims 
unless Slain Itself. 

VII. 

The Gospel 108-121 

The Gospel God's Plan to Destroy Sin and 
Save the Sinner; The Gospel Born of 
Man's Original Likeness to God; Develop- 
ment of the Gospel; The Gospel the Story 
of the World's Greatest Life; The Gospel 
Necessarily Many-sided; The Gospel Is the 
Miracle of Miracles ; And Proves and Keys 
the Supernatural; Both Simplicity and 
Mystery Inhere in the Gospel; the Inscru- 
tability of the Gospel Proves Its Divinity; 
How the Gospel Saves ; The Gospel Always 
the Preacher's Theme; The Good News of 
the Gospel. 

VIII. 

Jesus of Nazareth 122-136 

WTiy All Truth Focuses in Jesus; The Pri- 
ority of Jesus ; How Antiquity Converged 
in Need of Him; The Timeliness of His 
Incarnation ; All Bible Roads Lead to Him ; 
He Is the Correlative of the Holy Scrip- 
tures; He Is the Union of God and Man; 
9 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Jesus Is the Acme of Excellence ; His Uni- 
versality; The Fate of His Perfection; 
His Passion Was to Serve; And God Made 
Him Lord and Christ; Salvation Is His 
Essential Work; Jesus Is Forever the Son 
of Man; What He Was and What He Is. 

IX. 

The Holy Spirit 137-151 

The Spirit and the Body; Why No Com- 
mission to Preach the Holy Spirit; The 
Holy Spirit Operates Through the New 
Testament; Which He Himself Inspired; 
The Holy Spirit Intelligible in the Word; 
Disloyalty to the Spirit's Message Causes 
Apostasy; The Holy Spirit Related to 
Christ as Christ to God; The Holy Spirit 
Judges the World by the Word of Jesus; 
The Rational Testimony of the Holy Spirit 
the Foundation of Hope; The Church Is 
the Body of the Holy Spirit; The Sin 
Against the Holy Spirit; Why the Holy 
Spirit Is a New Testament Revelation; 
How to Receive the Benefit of the Holy 
Spirit. 

X. 

The Apostles 152-166 

The Necessity for Competent Witnesses of 
Jesus; The Preliminary Work and Names 
of the Apostles; Their General Prepara- 
tion; Their Special Training; Their Edu- 
cation and Inspiration; Their Testimony 
the Foundation of Our Faith; The Secret 
of Their Power; Completion of the Work 
of Jesus in Them by the Holy Spirit; Why 
They Were Baptized of the Holy Spirit; 
"The Gift of the Holy Spirit"; The Apos- 
tles the Greatest Men in History; Their 
Humility, Equality and Power; The Abso- 
lute Eternal Primacy of the Twelve Apos- 
tles; The Apostolate Is Fully Accomplished 
in Them. 

10 



CONTENTS 



XL PAGE 

The Great Commission 167-180 

Why the Ministry of Jesus Limited to the 
Jews ; The Five Records of the Great Com- 
mission; Its Magnitude Demanded Repeti- 
tion and Taxed All Forms of Expression; 
It Is the Climax of the Divine Plan for 
Humanity; It Announces the Rich Provi- 
sion of God for All; Based on Love as 
Authority, It Proves Its Originator Divine; 
It Is the New Covenant Unfolded by Acts 
and the Epistles; How the Great Commis- 
sion Saves the Church; It Is the Only Sal- 
vation for the Sinner and Hope for the 
Christian; The Great Commission Wisely 
Prescribes No Method of Procedure; Its 
Challenge Will Bring Victory When Heeded 
by the Whole Church. 

XII. 
The Church 181-195 

Why the Old Testament Had No Church; 
Why the Church Could Not Exist Till 
Pentecost; The Cost of the Ideal of the 
Church; The Model Church in Jerusalem; 
The Church Is for the Universal Manifesta- 
tion of Christ; The Church Paralyzed by 
Neglect and Schism ; The Only Cure for 
This Paralysis; The Church Organized for 
Care and Conquest; And the Proper Divi- 
sion of Labor; The Saved Are Born, Not 
"Joined," into the Church; The Glorious 
Service of the Church; The Doctrine and 
Operations of the Church. 

XIII. 
The Christian Memorials 196-210 

The Imperishable Monuments of Christ ; 
Significance of the Baptism of Jesus; The 
Divine Principle and the Unique Relation 
of Baptism; How to Settle the Question of 
Baptism; Baptism Suits Action of Body to 
Penitence of Spirit ; How Jesus Safeguards 
His Against Forgetting Him; How the 
11 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Lord's Supper Evinces His Life; And Re- 
freshes Us with His Love; It Is for the 
Spiritual Welfare of the Christian; And 
Blesses the Communicant with Self-knowl- 
edge; And the Most Direct Communion 
with Jesus; The Occasion of the Lord's 
Day; The Privilege of the Lord's Day vs. 
the Restriction of the Sabbath; The Su- 
periority of the Lord's Day. 

XIV. 

The Abiding Principles 211-225 

The Immortal Virtues; The Purpose of 
Miracles Achieved; The Perfection of 
Faith and Hope and Love; The Meaning 
of Faith; The Source of Faith; The Func- 
tion and the Object of Faith; The Value 
of Hope; It Eternizes Youth; And Purifies 
the Heart and Sharpens Sight; Love the 
Acme of All Virtue; The Initiative and the 
Divinity of Love; Things that Disappear; 
Things that Abide; The Indispensability 
of Faith and Hope and Love; Their In- 
comparable Riches. 

XV. 

Salvation 226-239 

Salvation Relative and Absolute; How 
Salvation Proves the Bible Inspired; Sig- 
nificance of the Divine Element in Salva- 
tion; Salvation and Depravity; The Equal- 
ity and Uniformity of Salvation; How the 
Sinner Saves Himself; How Salvation 
Achieves God's Original Purpose; Both the 
Body and the Spirit Saved; Salvation a 
Perfect Life; Salvation and Evolution; 
Salvation the Beginning of Christian Ex- 
perience; The Infinite Possibilities of Sal- 
vation; All the Saved to Be Like Jesus; 
His Second Coming the Climax of Time. 

Index 241-251 

12 



INTRODUCTION 

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CHRISTIANITY 

A CLEAR perception of the basic prin- 
** ciples of our religion would have 
saved the church from its shameful divi- 

~u • . ^ ^ , sions. The foundation is 

Christ the Only , , ^ 1 ' i 

, . fundamental to a house, 

Foundation , • ,. . ,, 

but a portico is not. Men 
have quarreled about their opinions, in 
which there is no necessity for unanimity ; 
and many, seeing the numberless frag- 
ments into which Christendom has been 
broken by human creeds, have declared 
unity impossible. Most certainly, on ac- 
count of the difference in temperament 
and the variety in environment, there can 
be no universal agreement, nor is it desir- 
able that there should be, save as to that 
which is elemental. And here there must 
be concord, for there is only one founda- 
tion, though the structures erected on it 
may vary as gold does from silver, or 
costly stones from wood, hay or stubble 
(1 Cor. 3:10-15). Any institution is 
characterless and powerless without defi- 
nite first principles; and Christianity is 

13 



INTRODUCTION 



forever grounded in its fundamentals, 
which cannot be modified till sin has been 
destroyed and the very constitution of 
man changed. But truth is effective only 
when it is incarnated; and all the essen- 
tials of the Christian religion center in 
Christ, in whom alone it has been per- 
fectly illustrated. 

However men may differ, they are 
primarily alike. This is true physically, 

L#k for all must breathe and 

_ l . TT . eat and drink to live ; it 

Demands Union . , • ^ n n 

is also true intellectually 
and morally and spiritually, for all are 
subject to the same law of growth and 
happiness and destiny: and for this rea- 
son the whole human race can and should 
be together in that which is basal. There 
is a longing in every heart too deep for 
words to express, and that which satisfies 
the soul is fundamental to mankind. Men 
have worshiped at the shrine of idols, and 
lived in superstition, and died in igno- 
rance; they have enslaved themselves to 
the god of lust, sacrificed to the deity of 
gold or made obeisance to the goddess of 
pleasure, and expired in hopeless misery; 
rejecting the Bible, they have prated of 
sermons in running brooks and rolling 
seas and lofty mountains and expansive 

14 



INTRODUCTION 



plains, and reached the end of life starved 
in soul and distracted in spirit; and, only 
as they have broken the crust of unbelief 
and come out of the shell of infidelity and 
found their way through the maze of 
false teaching to Jesus Christ, has their 
heart-hunger been appeased and their 
soul-yearning satisfied. The great funda- 
mental need of man is God, and Jesus has 
limited God to human comprehension. 

Religion is both natural and super- 
natural. Born of the very mystery of 
_, .. . XT . life, it is also universal. 

Religion Natural ^11 ,i • 111 

. „ , the heathen is impelled 

and Supernatural , , . , - K 

to worship by the obscu- 
rity of his own being, and his depraved 
imagination makes his image a god. Re- 
ligion is the gravity of the human spirit 
toward the divine; but sin has perverted 
this tendency, so that the wicked worship 
their belly, glory in their shame, mind 
earthly things and end in perdition (Rom. 
16: 18; Phil. 3: 19). Every human being 
is naturally religious, and if he is igno- 
rant of Jehovah his fancy will create a 
false god. No man, however wise, ever 
discovered God (Job 11:7-12), and all 
true philosophers are humbled by the 
limitations of their knowledge. Though 
the everlasting power and divinity of the 

2 15 



INTRODUCTION 



Creator are perceived through the things 
created (Rom. 1 : 18-23), not even Moses, 
the man of God, could see the glory of 
His face (Ex. 33: 17-25), nor could Job 
find Him (Job 23: 8, 9), and an Israelite 
indeed, like Nathanael, had to be brought 
to Jesus (John 1 : 43-51). And the dark- 
est picture imaginable is the depravity of 
those in whom sin puts out the light of 
God (Rom. 1:24-32). 

Religion is both objective and subjec- 
tive. In this world man depends funda- 

R .. . mentally on his senses, 

•v. . e J !. glC , and God objectified Him- 

Objective and 1j: . T /-i- , t> , 

s ,. . self in Jesus Christ. But 

if Jesus had not worked 
miracles as signs of His divinity, nobody 
ever would have accepted Him as the Son 
of God (John 20: 30, 31) ; and if He had 
not arisen from the dead, His life never 
would have been written and His name 
would have been forgotten long ago. But 
we know that millions have believed, and 
do believe, on Him as the Christ, and that 
His biography was written repeatedly. 
Thus the supernatural truth of Christi- 
anity is as demonstrable, by clear, unmis- 
takable reason, as a problem in mathe- 
matics. Christianity is the only religion 
whose founder has conquered death, and 

16 



INTRODUCTION 



therefore the only system adequate to the 
fundamental needs of the human heart. 

Hence, the Bible is a revelation. In- 
deed, it is the only source of information 
in regard to Christ and 
e upremacy ^ e on jy authoritative in- 
terpretation of Christian- 
ity; and it is in reference to Jesus that the 
Bible is divided into the Old and the New 
Testament. The Old Testament is patri- 
archal and Jewish, but not Christian. A 
man, calling my attention to a statute in 
the Pentateuch that would be intolerable 
now, asked if Moses were a Christian. 
Of course he was not, neither was any 
other man who lived and died under the 
Old Covenant. Jesus Himself was born 
and lived and died a Jew, but He arose 
from the dead to become both Lord and 
Christ (Acts 2: 32-36) ; and Christianity 
began on the day of Pentecost. That 
Moses made mistakes is no modern dis- 
covery, for his sins are written in the 
ancient record ; neither is it any argument 
against the authenticity of the Bible. 
Both Testaments paint their characters 
as they were, and when the Christ ap- 
peared, the men who had been types of 
Him disappeared like the stars at sunrise. 
It was inevitable that Jesus should become 

17 



INTRODUCTION 



the supreme Leader of the race; and He 
can never be superseded, for He has 
reached the acme of excellence. 

And so all the fundamentals of Chris- 
tianity are in the New Testament. The 

_„_ Old Testament is essen- 

Pnmary Themes ,. , < ., r . , 

tial only as it foreshad- 
ows the New, by which we are guided in 
our treatment of the primary themes, the 
subjects of this volume, the Bible, the 
Testaments, the Dispensations, Religion, 
Law, Sin, the Gospel, Jesus, the Holy 
Spirit, the Apostles, the Great Commis- 
sion, the Church, the Christian Memori- 
als, the Abiding Principles and Salvation. 
And here we see how admirably the relig- 
ion of Christ is adapted to human need: 
the grace of God is dispensed through 
Him as Prophet, Priest and King; He 
qualified His Apostles to be His witnesses 
forever by His personal influence and by 
the power of the Holy Spirit; He created 
His church to reproduce His life in the 
world, and commissioned it to preach His 
gospel to every creature; He memorial- 
ized Himself in baptism, the Lord's Sup- 
per and the Lord's Day, that men might 
be able to love God and one another 
through Him and hope for eternal life 
through His salvation from sin. 

18 



INTRODUCTION 



The teaching of the New Testament is 

vital. In these modern days there is a 

vtai'tv f th looseness as to doctrine. 

XT * l _ ] It is often heard that 

New Testament (( i 1 • j 

one church is as good as 
another," and the adherents to the faith 
and order of the Scriptures are tabooed 
by the devotees of modernity. The pre- 
cepts of Jesus and His Apostles are 
slurred, if not rejected, as old doctrine. 
The truth of the New Testament, like its 
Author, "is the same yesterday and to- 
day, yea and for ever" (Heb. 13: 8) ; and 
it is applicable to every generation, what- 
ever their circumstances, stage of devel- 
opment or degree of culture. As long as 
men live and die, as long as the sun shines 
above their heads, as long as the earth 
exists and brings forth her fruit, the New- 
Testament of Jesus Christ will be in de- 
mand and up to date. It answers affirm- 
atively and convincingly and gloriously 
the question, "If a man die, shall he live 
again?" as fresh and as irrepressible now 
as when Job asked it (Job 14: 1) ; and we 
shall never exceed its knowledge till we 
are ushered into immortality. Higher 
than circumstances, deeper than environ- 
ment and broader than society, it always 
makes expediency and common sense trib- 

19 



INTRODUCTION 



utary to its purpose. In matters inciden- 
tal or impossible of revelation — as, the 
state of the dead — it tolerates any opinion 
compatible with its spirit. But, perfectly 
articulated with the permanent need of 
humanity, it withholds its joy and peace 
and hope from all who ignore or disobey 
its law of pardon for the sinner and of 
life for the Christian. If it is not plain 
here, it is discredited, and, if it is not 
true, let every man go his own way. 

Doctrine and life are closely related 
as cause and effect, though this associa- 
~ A . j T .. tion may not be apparent 

Doctrine and Life . * • "\ 1 mi 

immediately. 1 he rum 
of Jeroboam's idolatry, the first king of 
Israel after the division, who taught his 
people to sin, is seen in Ahab, the seventh 
king. And if America had accepted the 
mouthings of Bob Ingersoll, we would 
now be in the throes of barbarism or 
savagery. The life of Jesus is glorious 
above that of all men, because of the per- 
fection of His principle. If we ever ap- 
proach Him, we must follow the funda- 
mental teaching of His Testament. By 
the gift and inspiration of His Spirit we 
shall at last become like unto Him. 

But sin made the ideals of Christ im- 
possible of achievement. Christianity 
20 



INTRODUCTION 



was established at the earliest possible 

moment. Surely God would not withhold 

the ultimate religion from 
Sin as ° , . 

any race or generation or 

man. But not until the 
education of the law of Moses and the 
inspiration of the prophets were there 
even a few people in the earth who would 
accept the model of Jesus, and not till the 
gospel had been created as "the power of 
God unto salvation" was there any who 
could approach the excellency of His life. 
The Jews were so beclouded in mind that 
they knew Him not who was their glory, 
and so hardened in heart that they re- 
sisted His appeals and killed Him; the 
Gentiles were so ungodly that Paul's min- 
istry among them looked like a failure; 
and even now only a small portion of 
humanity makes any serious attempt to 
walk in the perfect way. 

And those who do follow Jesus must 
band themselves together in the church 

- to create an atmosphere 

How Overcome . 1*1, 1 • 1 1 , 

in which to live and bat- 
tle successfully against a wicked world. 
The volunteer in the army of the Lord 
embodies his faith and penitence by bap- 
tism; and the Christian soldier, looking 
backward to the Incarnation, upward to 



INTRODUCTION 



the Celestial Throne and forward to the 

Second Advent, realizes the presence of 
his Captain by the celebration of the 
Lord's Supper, while the Holy Spirit 
dwells in his heart to comfort him by the 
Word of God, form his character and 
glorify his life. Christianity is the only 
religion that actually saves men, and it 
must eventually supplant all false systems. 
The Christian, perfected in life by faith 
and hope and love, is destined through 
death to eternal glory. 

And thus we see that Christianity is 

constructed on the broad lines of ever- 

__ „, . . lasting truth. At bottom, 

The Triangles ... • ^ • 1 J 

f L>f life is a triangle; and 

Christianity describes its 
sides by "soberly and righteously and 
godly." To be sober is to be true to one's 
self, to be righteous is to be true to others, 
and to be godly is to be true to God. 
Christ demands His followers to give up 
no good thing; they must deny only "un- 
godliness and worldly lusts" (Tit. 2: 11- 
14). Life is also a triangle in relation to 
time — the past, present and future. And 
the divine religion, instructing us how to 
live in the present, sees only one event in 
the past — the appearance of the grace of 
God, and only one event in the future — 

22 



INTRODUCTION 



"the blessed hope and appearing of the 
glory of the great God and our Saviour 
Jesus Christ." 

The New Testament is authoritative 

because it is true. The man who knows 

_. A . , A can always speak with 

The Authority - . J T r . , . , 

, „, . authority. Jesus is chief 

of Truth J J j . t 

on earth and in heaven 
because He knows everything. And the 
Apostles knew, because Jesus told them 
and the Holy Spirit inspired them ; and to 
them we must go for the fundamentals of 
Christianity. Where is the man who, 
save as he has studied the Word of God 
and practiced its precepts, can speak with 
authority, or even with edification, in 
religion ! The authority of the New Tes- 
tament is not arbitrary or mechanical or 
legalistic, for it is as deep as the founda- 
tion of the universe. And to reject it is 
to be lost forever! 

The primary need of men is to be 

saved from sin. Preachers make a mis- 

™. tv . xt * take by taking it for 

The First Need A J A l( , fe . 

fM granted that sinners 

know what to do to be 
saved. Every Bible school should be 
drilled on the steps into the church, which 
are also the conditions of the salvation of 
the alien sinner — faith in Jesus as the 

23 



INTRODUCTION 



Son of God, repentance of sin, confession 
of Jesus before men, and baptism as the 
likeness of His death, burial and resurrec- 
tion. And every sermon should throw the 
searchlight of revelation on the door into 
the kingdom of heaven. Of course, to 
come into the church is merely to begin; 
but sinners will not start unless the way 
is made plain and urgent. And let all 
who thus accept the true religion keep 
themselves in Bible study and prayer and 
worship and Christian endeavor. 

Review Questions 

Note. — One question is devoted to 
each paragraph in this book, to help the 
reader fix the contents in his mind and 
also to provoke his own original thought. 
And to guide the student to the proper 
paragraph, each question repeats in italics 
the phraseology of the theme of the 
paragraph in which its answer is to be 
found. 

1 (1) How does the perception of 
Christ as the only foundation affect the 
structure of the church? 

2 (2) How does the likeness of men 
demand union? 

3 (3) How is religion both natural 
and supernatural? 

24 



INTRODUCTION 



4 (4) How is religion both objective 
and subjective? 

5 (5) Why is Jesus supreme? 

6 (6) What primary themes are the 
subjects of this volume? 

7 (7) Why is the New Testament 
vital? 

8 (8) What is the relation of doc- 
trine and life? 

9 (9) How has sin been an obstacle? 

10 (10) How 'is sin overcome? 

11 (11) What are the triangles of life? 

12 (12) How only can any man speak 
with the authority of truth in religion? 

13 (13) What four steps must be 
taken to meet the first need of men? 



25 



I 

THE BIBLE 

THERE can be no question that among 
all the records and the literature of 
the world the Bible is our most priceless 
treasure, of which every 

Importance of , / . i_ u i 

, „.,_, human being should have 

the Bible t ^ 

an adequate grasp, an in- 
telligent understanding and a satisfactory 
appreciation. I would like to arrest the 
reader's attention, and encourage him to 
peruse the Bible, memorize its text, study 
its thought, obey its precepts, accept its 
promises, admire its beauty, absorb its 
sentiment, lay hold on its faith, drink 
in its hope, possess its love, incarnate 
its spirit, realize its ideal and enjoy its 
life. 

The Bible is a book, yea, the Book — 

old and new and open. Its history is the 

on. t*.j ,.. * most ancient, antedating 

The Fidelity of i . i i , 

.u ™- M man and going back to 

the Bible - , . P % , 

the beginning. Its record 
is severely true to life, narrating the bad, 
as well as the good, in its heroes: the ac- 
ceptance of Abel and the rejection of 

27 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

Cain, with the former's blood crying out 
to God and the latter's miserable, abject 
life; Noah's faithfulness before the flood 
and drunkenness after the flood; Abra- 
ham's faith, and his faltering when, in 
Egypt, he represented his wife to be his 
sister; Jacob's cunning craftiness and Is- 
rael's princely character; Moses' wonder- 
ful meekness and remarkable arrogance; 
David's rare unselfishness and wanton 
criminality; Solomon's incomparable wis- 
dom and unprecedented foolishness; 
Peter's impulsive defense, and flagrant, 
profane denial, of the Lord; Saul's unre- 
lenting zeal as a persecutor, and Paul's 
untiring, deathless devotion as a Chris- 
tian. 

The diction of the Bible is the grand- 
est, its style is the most sublime and its 

The Bible the P° et , ry - * the most beau- 
_ „ . tiful in conception and 

Greatest Classic . • 01 i 

in art, surpassing Shake- 
speare or Milton, and making it the great- 
est of all classics. It is also the basis of 
all law and the concord of all science. It 
touches fundamentally or incidentally 
every department of human learning and 
every phase of the life of man. It is a 
mirror in which we see ourselves, and a 
picture of the world which, as we look 

28 



THE BIBLE 



upon it, makes us contemporary with our 
fellows in all time. 

But it is speaking loosely to say that 

the Bible is a book. It is a great series 

^u t,-i_i of books, the world's 

The Bible a , i <• i i-i_ 

most wonderful library, 
with the choicest and the 
best of every kind of literature. It has 
law and history and devotion and proph- 
ecy, prose and poetry, narratives and ex- 
positions and arguments and letters and 
biographies; and it is pastoral, epic, dra- 
matic, tragic. It is personal and local and 
universal and timeless. It is of man and 
of God. It rests on the earth and reaches 
unto heaven. It is marvel and miracle 
that the Bible, written by about forty men 
who lived in different ages, and wrote in 
three continents, in many countries, in 
three languages and from every possible 
viewpoint, is a unit. 

Its human authors were kings, farm- 
ers, mechanics, scientists, lawyers, gener- 
A ~. . . als, fishermen, ministers 

A Divine-human \ 

-> . A . and priests; one was a 

Production t * ' , 

tax-collector and one was 
a doctor; some were rich and some were 
poor; some were reared in the city and 
some grew up in the country. But back 
of all these men, and above them and be- 

29 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

neath them and round about them and in 
them, whether they were always conscious 
of it or not, was the great God Almighty. 
The Bible has a human setting, but its 
impulse came from on high. It is swept 
by the eye of Jehovah, unified by His 
thought, elevated by His standard, ener- 
gized by His power and magnetized by 
His personality. 

The Bible is the Word of God. 
"Every scripture inspired of God is 

The Word of P rofitable r for r teaching, 
_ « , « for reproof, for correc- 

God and Source . . <■ • / .- i • i 

* ah o j tion, for instruction which 

of All Good . ' . t , M , ■ , 

is in righteousness: that 

the man of God may be complete, fur- 
nished completely unto every good work" 
(2 Tim. 3: 16). "For no prophecy ever 
came by the will of man; but men spake 
from God, being moved by the Holy 
Spirit" (2 Pet. 1:21). All through the 
Bible the claim is made that it is the 
Word of God; and if this claim is false, 
how can we believe any of the Bible? 
But, aside from what it says of itself, it 
has proved its divinity by its great uplift 
and marvelous light and superior life and 
eternal hope. Time is a great tester. 
Books come and go, but the Bible con- 
tinues forever. Man has had the open 

30 



THE BIBLE 



Bible in his hands for centuries ; but it is 
as new as the glossy blue above our 
heads, as modern as the face of nature 
or the heart and life of man, as fresh as 
the driven snow or the growing lily, as 
warm as the sun that heats the world, 
and as mysterious as the star that shim- 
mers in the distance. It is the creator or 
inspirer of all other good books, the 
builder of nations, the maker of men, the 
foundation of society, the hope of heaven. 
The Bible is as indispensable as bread. 
We can live without ice-cream or candy 
„ ~ . or soda-water, but we 

Sufficient unto , , , j Tx ri1 

„ XT . must have bread. With- 

Human Need A A * ^., , 

out the Bible, man is ig- 
norant of his creation in the image of 
God, the source from which he came, the 
ideals for which he should strive and the 
destiny toward which he hastens; but 
with it, he walks in light and rejoices in 
hope. The Bible meets every human need. 
For the sinner it has warning, admoni- 
tion, exhortation, forgiveness, hope; and 
for the righteous it has work, enterprise, 
peace, joy, fellowship, vision, life! It 
contains the seed (Luke 8: 11), the very 
germ of life, from which the Christian is 
produced; and when the sinner receives 
this seed in faith, develops it in hope and 

3 31 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

nurtures it in love, the gateway of heaven 
opens unto him. 

The Bible is fundamental to the race, 

as well as to the individual. It creates the 

.... , atmosphere of nations, 

And Mastery of j i ., m 1 r 

A «r ,j and makes it possible for 

the World . ^ j ,1 « 

great men to do their 
work. Clarifying the conscience, purify- 
ing the heart and rectifying the life, it 
adjusts man to His Creator and to the 
world in which he lives. The Bible 
marches in the forefront of all progress. 
Science is merely classified knowledge of 
God's world, over which man can achieve 
the mastery only as his mind is humbled 
by the wisdom of the Creator, as his 
heart is pierced by the vision of the Lord 
and as his life is sharpened by the law of 
God. The Bible has led in all modern in- 
vention and discovery, in ways so subtle 
and by leaven so quiet that it has escaped 
atention; and man, vain man, has im- 
agined that his achievement was by his 
own power. 

The Bible is fundamentally religious. 
But religion, as we shall see, is of the 

whole life. The great 

Supremely - ,. . ° 

purpose of religion cor- 
relates all the books of 
the Bible. Incidentally the Bible contains 

32 



THE BIBLE 



great history, and that history is true — 
it actually happened. But the Bible is 
incomplete in its record of the world, of 
any nation, of any human being. It uses 
history and biography and law and gospel 
and prophecy and praise and instruction 
as these are necessary to its great pur- 
pose of salvation from sin and of eternal 
life. To say that the Bible is religious is 
to say that it is devoted to life. It origi- 
nated in life, and it never accomplishes its 
purpose till it gets back into life. It is 
incidental that the Bible is a book, or a 
series of books. At first it was lived and 
spoken, and then it was written for the 
sake of future generations. 

The Bible is a book of principles with 

concrete illustrations. Faith is incarnated 

in Abraham, purity shows 

Illustrated and , j j 

_ L , its beauty and rewards 

Incarnated . T 1,1 <• 

in Joseph, the power of 
meekness is illustrated in Moses, courage 
is personified in Peter, the attraction of 
love is shown in John, the triumph of zeal 
and enthusiasm stands out in Paul, and 
the whole Bible in its essence of truth and 
virtue and nobility is in Jesus. The 
printed page is sacred to us, because it is 
the form in which the unfolding of God's 
plan and His providence in dealing with 
m 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

the Jews and with the world generally, 
and the story of His love, have come 
down to us. But the most effective edition 
of the Word of God is in the hearts and 
lives of men. The Bible must have hands 
to bless, feet to walk, eyes to see, ears to 
hear, hearts to sympathize and compas- 
sionate and lives to serve and to sacrifice. 
The Bible is so great that no man, no 
generation, ever could contain it all. The 
™_ «. L1 . patriarchs had light as 

The Bible is f, n « 9 . 

T c . they could appreciate it, 

Infinite / - . K.K . ' 

and their dispensation 
grew into that of the Jewish nation, with 
its law of Moses, which prepared the way 
for Christ. But the light of God's prom- 
ise flashes from the beginning to the end. 
When Jehovah sentenced the serpent, the 
subtle tempter (Gen. 3: 15), He described 
the travail of woman, pictured the strug- 
gle of man, wrote the history of the race 
and sounded the doom of the Devil ; when 
He made promise to Abraham (Gen. 
12: 3), stirred the heart of Jacob to utter 
the first Messianic prophecy (Gen. 49: 
10), and used Moses as the type of the 
coming One (Deut 18: IS), He was turn- 
ing attention to the great future when He 
would reach the climax of His revelation 
in His Son. But, no doubt, in the light 

34 



THE BIBLE 



of the years that have passed with their 
wonderful achievements, we can see more 
in these things than could those who first 
heard them. The Bible grew and the 
Bible grows; or, rather, men, with the 
increasing light of experience and history 
and under the influence of the Lord as 
they are able to grasp His Word, grow in 
intellect, in heart and in spirit, into a 
more perfect understanding of the Bible 
and into a more adequate incarnation of 
its life. 

Beginning in a small country with a 

people despised and persecuted, the Bible 

TT . , has spread all over the 

Universal and 1 1 Tj 1 1 

. . world. It has been trans- 

lated into all the lan- 
guages and dialects of the earth, and is 
destined to achieve the unity of the race. 
It ministers to man as man, without re- 
gard to distinctions of sex or station or 
nation or race or time. But its instruc- 
tion and comfort and admonition and 
exhortation and inspiration are accom- 
modated to the exigencies of life. Exalt- 
ing the humble and humbling the exalted 
(Jas. 1:9-11), it is absolutely impartial. 
It recognizes no mark but character, but 
it knows all the moods and vicissitudes of 
life. It lifts the heart out of the dust 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

and fog and soot of earth, and, in spite 
of adversity or misfortune or death, 
makes peace and joy constant and eternal. 
Hence, the Bible is final. It is not true 
that new revelations, aside from the 
Bible, come to men now. But the Spirit 
of God, in His Word and in His world 
by His Word, is constantly leading men 
into a better understanding of the written 
Word and impelling them to a more 
spiritual service. 

Sufficient unto the task of enlighten- 
ing the nations and of piloting every gen- 
~ . _ ., eration over the sea of 

Complete Guide . , < . , 

r OM-- xxt ,j time, and making- abun- 

for This World - / - & „ - 

dant room for all the 
growth of which men are capable, the 
Bible is final for this life only. As the 
guide for the present world the Bible is 
complete. But, contrary to the criticism 
often hurled against it that it deals chiefly 
with the future, in its description of the 
world to come, it is of necessity incom- 
plete and fragmentary and visionary. 
Jesus said to His disciples, "I have yet 
many things to say unto you, but ye can- 
not bear them now" (John 16: 12). We 
can not live in the future world while we 
are in the present world. And the life of 
heaven, as we catch glimpses of it in the 



THE BIBLE 



Bible, seems visionary, but its hope stirs 
us to our depths. Paul quoted, "Things 
which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and 
which entered not into the heart of man, 
whatsoever things God prepared for them 
that love him" (1 Cor. 2:9). 

Impossible to pen of angel or to 

tongue of man is the complete picture of 

. . T , . heaven, and if, indeed, 

And Leads the Jt . . J ' .,, 

„. . . A , this picture were possible, 

Finite to the f 1 f 1 J 

no human heart could 
understand it. John, con- 
fidential friend, and loved and loving dis- 
ciple, of Jesus and peculiar instrument of 
the Holy Spirit, before whom the history 
of the world — things that had been, 
things that were and things that were to 
be — passed as in panorama, exhausted the 
beauty and grandeur and wonder of the 
material world, even unto its precious 
stones and valuable gold and attractive 
cities, to describe heaven ; but John doubt- 
less felt, and we feel, the inadequacy of 
his description. The things of time can 
not contain the things of eternity. Paul, 
caught up into paradise, heard unspeak- 
able words, which it is not lawful for a 
man to utter (2 Cor. 12: 1-4). Jesus has 
gone to prepare a place for us, but who 
can imagine that place (John 14: 2) ! We 

37 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

are the children of God now and it does 
not yet appear what we shall be, but it is 
satisfying to know that we shall be like 
Jesus when we see Him (1 John 3:2, 3). 
Now we have the Bible, with its basic 
law, its glorious history, its spiritual de- 
votion, its exposing prophecy and its im- 
mortal hope. And what we shall have, 
for the ceaseless ages and cycles of eter- 
nity, surpasses the mind to know, the 
heart to understand, the tongue to tell, 
the pen to write! 

Review Questions 

14 (1) What should the reader do 
in recognition of the importance of the 
Bible? 

15 (2) How is the fidelity of the 
Bible shown? 

16 (3) Why is the Bible the great- 
est classic? 

17 (4) Why is the Bible a library? 

18 (5) Why is it a divine-human 
production? 

19 (6) Why is it the Word of God 
and the source of all good? 

20 (7) Why is it sufficient unto 
human need? 

21 (8) How does it lead to the mas- 
tery of the world? 

38 



THE BIBLE 



22 (9) How is it proved to be 
supremely religious? 

23 (10) How is it illustrated and in- 
carnated? 

24 (11) What proves that the Bible 
is infinite? 

25 (12) What proves that it is uni- 
versal and final? 

26 (13) How is it shown to be a 
complete guide for this world? 

27 (14) How does it lead the finite to 
the infinite? 



39 



II 

THE TESTAMENTS 

THE Bible is the final court of appeal 
in religion. Any religion out of 
harmony with its principles, or false to 
„«„.,_ its ideals, or opposed to 

The Hemispheres . , , .' . rr 

t **. t>.ui its teaching, is a counter- 

of the B.ble fdt But « the B . ble> j.^ 

the world, is divided into two great hemi- 
spheres, the Old and the New Testa- 
ment. And these Testaments are by no 
means now of equal authority: the very 
first thing in the intelligent study of the 
Word of God is to note this fact; and 
none who overlook it heed the injunction 
of Paul, "Give diligence to present thyself 
approved unto God, a workman that need- 
eth not to be ashamed, handling aright 
the word of truth" (2 Tim. 2: 15). Of 
course both Testaments are divine, but 
they are both also human. And in the 
application of Scripture we must of neces- 
sity know who wrote it and to whom it 
was written. 

Testament means will, or covenant, 

40 



THE TESTAMENTS 



and a covenant is a contract, or an agree- 
ment, between two or more parties. God 
has always had an agreement with his 
people. He contracted 

..1. ™ with Adam that he should 

with Men ,. ,- j r 

live in the garden of 

Eden and dress it and keep it, and that 
he should eat of every tree in the garden 
but that of the knowledge of good and 
evil (Gen. 2: 15, 16). But man violated 
this agreement and was cast out of Eden. 
Jehovah must have had an understanding 
with Cain and Abel, for they both made 
offerings unto Him (Gen. 4: 3-5). It is 
nowhere expressly stated that God com- 
manded them to make sacrifice. But Abel 
offered his sacrifice by faith (Heb. 11:4), 
and faith comes by hearing the Word of 
God (Rom. 10: 17) ; Cain sinned, and sin 
is lawlessness (1 John 3:4). So Abel 
must have followed the instructions of the 
Lord, but Cain set them at naught. Jeho- 
vah agreed with Noah that if he would 
build an ark according to His directions, 
he and his house, together with represen- 
tatives of the lower animals, should be 
saved from the flood; and subsequently, 
through this faithful and heroic represen- 
tative, God made a covenant with every 
living thing that never again should the 

41 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

world be destroyed by water (Gen. 9: 
8-17). 

But these stipulations were all with or 

through individuals, for the reason, no 

_, „ doubt, that there were no 

The Center .11 u 

others who would con- 

~. . _ ^ tract with the Lord. The 

Old Testament r A * . 

first dispensation was in- 
dividual or patriarchal from necessity. 
But Jehovah saw that, to stay the prog- 
ress of idolatry and to establish the wor- 
ship of the true and the living God in 
the earth, He must have a great nation 
through which to operate. And, finding 
no nation He could use, He proceeded to 
create one through the descendants of 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For the 
separate development of this nation, He 
made the covenant of circumcision origi- 
nally with Abraham. And when the 
Hebrews, or Israelites, grown to a mul- 
titude, came to Mount Sinai, He promised 
them that if they would keep His cove- 
nant they should be "a kingdom of 
priests and a holy nation" (Ex. 19: 1-6). 
Now, the Old Testament, though it has 
flashes of light and intuitions and proph- 
ecies of the New, centers in this covenant 
with the Jews. 

The New Testament is the supreme 

42 



THE TESTAMENTS 



instrument of Jesus Christ. The new 
always grows out of and supersedes the 

Wh w h °^* ^ tnm g is new that 

y e av accommodates itself to 

„, change or that does not 

New Testament , °. « T1 A1J 

need to change. 1 he Old 
Testament was the best thing in existence 
while it was in force, but the plan and 
purpose of God under the leadership of 
Jesus fulfilled it by outgrowing it; and 
the New Testament became possible and 
necessary. The thought of Jesus would 
break asunder Old Testament molds. 
Standing on the law and the prophets and 
the Psalms, He built high above them and 
reached far beyond them. The Old Tes- 
tament could not adjust to the change, 
and so it surrendered its authority to the 
New. God would not burden the world 
with two Testaments if one would suffice, 
and if the New is not better than the Old, 
it has no right to exist. 

The New Testament is vastly superior 
to the Old. The Old Covenant was dedi- 
„,, „ . . cated by the blood of 

The Superiority « J * . /TT , 

calves and goats (Heb. 

ot the 9 . 1922 the New . s 

New Testament j 1 . ,11 ,, , 1 1 

dedicated by the blood 
erf Jesus Christ (Heb. 9: I1-I8). "All 
things are cleansed with blood, and apart 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

from the shedding of blood there is no 
remission/' But "it is impossible that the 
blood of bulls and goats should take away 
sin" (Heb. 10:4). Only Christ by the 
sacrifice of Himself could do that. In 
the Old Testament there was "a remem- 
brance made of sins year by year," but in 
the New sin is destroyed by Jesus Christ. 
The Old is only a picture of the New. 
The significance of the blood of animals 
sacrificed under the Old Covenant was 
that it was typical of the blood of Jesus 
Christ. It is wrong to offer dead animals 
unto God now, but we are to present our 
bodies as a living sacrifice (Rom. 12: 1). 
The New Testament has a better Me- 
diator. Moses, the mediator of the Old 
■*» ™ j. . Testament, was one of 

Moses Mediator - , ' * ,- , 

r .1. ™j the greatest of the human 

of the Old, 1,1 

„. . . , race ; but he was a sinner. 

Chnst of the TT ' . - .. 

N He could save neither 

himself nor those for 
whom he interceded. He realized his 
limitations, and saw in a vision the great- 
er Prophet to whom the people should 
give heed. But Jesus is a perfect Medi- 
ator, because He knows both God and 
man. Having lived in the frail house of 
clay, He is touched with the feeling of 
our infirmity; and, having been honored 

44 



THE TESTAMENTS 



by the Father in His resurrection from 
the dead, He has been glorified with the 
glory He had before the world was. 
"Much more then, being now justified by 
his blood, shall we be saved from the 
wrath of God through him. For if, while 
we were enemies, we were reconciled to 
God through the death of his Son, much 
more, being reconciled, shall we be saved 
by his life" (Rom. 5:9, 10). "Where- 
fore also he is able to save to the utter- 
most them that draw near unto God 
through him, seeing he ever liveth to 
make intercession for them" (Heb. 7: 
25). "And if any man sin, we have an 
Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ 
the righteous: and he is the propitiation 
for sins; and not for ours only, but also 
for the whole world" (1 John 2: 1, 2). 
The Old Testament in its constitution 
was written on stone, but the New in its 
r¥M . _.„. essence is written in the 

The Difference . , , , , -.- 

in Their mind and heart and life. 

o ^ .. Under the Old Covenant 

Constitutions ^ A ., - T . , ,, 

the tribe of Levi (or the 

family of Aaron) officiated as priests for 

all the other tribes, but under the New 

every man is his own priest. Through 

Christ we have direct approach to God. 

And it is the height of presumption for 

45 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

any man to officiate as priest for another. 
Neither is the worship of the New Testa- 
ment limited to any place. But in the 
Old, Jerusalem was the place to worship, 
and there the tribes gathered three times 
a year for their great annual feasts. It is 
still wise and necessary to have houses 
dedicated to the worship of God, but we 
may worship Him in our homes, places of 
business, on the street, anywhere ! the 
only essential being that we worship "in 
spirit and truth." 

It is good for the disciples of Jesus in 
a district, state, nation or the world to 

Th Old. L ai meet ^ or tne dissemina- 

e a, oc , ^.^ ^ knowledge, the 

emporary, e interchange of thought, 

New, Universal, ,. , ° £ . , °,i 

_ the exchange of ideas, the 

Permanent P u i • <• 

fellowship of service or 
the inspiration of unity; but their worship 
is independent of the place of meeting. 
The Old Testament has the bondage of 
the body, the New has the liberty of the 
spirit: the one included only the Jews 
living in a small country, the other is ex- 
tended to all nations living everywhere; 
the one was local and temporary, the 
other is universal and permanent ; the one 
has the fixity of the stone on which it 
was written, the other has the elasticity 

46 



THE TESTAMENTS 



of the heart in which it dwells and of 

the spirit to which it is subordinated. 

In its beginning the Old Testament is 

occupied with the story of creation, but 

. -. . the New begins with the 

Contrast of Their , . ° . T 

_ . . new creation in Jesus. 

Beginnings The Q{d ^ ^ ^^ Qf 

God's chosen people ; the New is the story 
of His Son, the flower and glory of Israel 
and light for revelation to the Gentiles. 
The Old sojourned in the land of Canaan; 
the New thinks of that country as a type 
of heaven and sets its heart on the unseen. 
The Old had visions and dreams ; the New 
has the revelation of the Lord in plain 
language. The Old turned a rod into a 
snake and filled Egypt with plagues; the 
New heals the body, reads the mind, 
knows the heart, overpowers the spirits 
and transcends nature. The Old sang 
over the deliverance from Egypt; the 
New wonders, marvels, rejoices, exults, 
in salvation from sin. The Old humili- 
ated the proud heart of Pharaoh; the 
New trails the Devil in the dust and de- 
stroys his power forever. The Old ate 
manna and quails ; the New lives on spir- 
itual bread from heaven. 

In its development the Old Testament 
came to Mount Sinai and the birth of the 

4 47 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

Jewish nation, but the New grows into the 

church of Christ on the first Pentecost 

, _. . after His resurrection. 
Contrast of Their r™ ^.u .^, ^ 

_ , lhe Old rang with the 

Development , , - °. - 

clash of arms in the con- 
quest of Canaan; the New rejoices in vic- 
tory "against the principalities, against 
the powers, against the world-rulers of 
this darkness, against the spiritual hosts 
of wickedness in the heavenly places/' 
The Old dispersed the Jews to cure them 
of idolatry and make them advocates of 
the true God; the New scatters the dis- 
ciples of Christ to make them all preach- 
ers of the gospel and missionaries of the 
cross. The Old saw Jewish communities 
in all nations; the New sees Christian 
churches everywhere established. The 
Old made room for praise and devotion, 
but these walk together in every book of 
the New. Much of the Old is poetry, but 
even the prose of the New is poetic. The 
Old gave large place to the prophets, but 
the apostles and the evangelists wrote the 
New. The Old shouted warning to the 
Jews ; the New lays bare the sin of hypoc- 
risy and exposes the crime of bigotry. 
The Old rang with judgment against the 
wicked; the New woos the sinner in love. 
In its conclusion the Old Testament 

48 



THE TESTAMENTS 



harked back to the law of Moses and 

looked forward to the day of Jehovah 

r^. (Mai. 4:4-6); but the 

Contrast of Their ^ T , . ' ' , 

„ , . New, having outgrown 

Conclusion ,« , j • • • 

the law and rejoicing in 
the day of Christ, pushes back the curtain 
of time and beholds the eternal. But 
the end of the Old, though about four 
hundred years intervened, is the begin- 
ning of the New. And (paradoxical as it 
may seem) while the two Testaments are 
radically different, they are much alike. 
What the Old attempted by rules positive 
and negative and by pressure from 
without, the New accomplished by a 
perfect example and by inspiration from 
within. 

The New Testament is the substance 

of which the Old is the shadow, and the 

-. . ,, A , fulfillment of the proph- 

Their Mutual £ , r ^ 1 - * A< « 

„ . ecy of the Old. The Old 

Corroboration • i , t ■» x • 1 11 

said the Messiah would 
come, and saw Him by faith; the New 
says He came, and makes Him contem- 
porary with all generations to the end of 
time. Much is common to the Testa- 
ments. The Old, largely quoted in the 
New, is the background of the New, and 
has much instruction for the Christian 
(Rom. 15:4). And though the Old has 
49 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

been displaced by the New, it remains our 
heritage. Each Testament interprets and 
illumines the other. A knowledge of both 
is necessary to a knowledge of either. 
Without the New the Old is obscure and 
clannish, and without the Old the New is 
abrupt and impossible. The Old is the 
scaffold; the New is the building com- 
pletely erected, perfectly painted, thor- 
oughly furnished and beautifully deco- 
rated. The Old is the crude conception; 
the New is the ideal elaborated and 
achieved. The Old is the "blade"; the 
New is "the full grain in the ear" (Mark 
4:28). The Old is the rivulet swelling 
into the river; the New is the wide, wide 
sea. The Old is the opening of the way 
back to God; the New is the threshold of 
heaven. The Old is paradise lost; the 
New is paradise regained. 

But let us remember this : we are free 

from the law of the Old Testament, and 

r™. ,-mj rr, subject absolutely to noth- 

The Old Testa- . J . ., ^ . . J . , 

_ T . . mgf in it that is not also a 

ment Not Author- ° J r - AT r™ 

. . XT part of the New. the 

itative Now £m j t» . 

Old Testament is as im- 
possible now as the backward flow of the 
Mississippi into Lake Itasca. The Old 
Testament was designed for the race in 
its immaturity. A man cannot be a boy 

50 



THE TESTAMENTS 



again nor wear his childhood clothes. 
The authority of the Old Testament, ex- 
ternal and threatening, might repress, but 
not reform. And when the ideal of Jesus 
Christ is planted in the hearts of men, 
they find in themselves the power of re- 
straint and rise above the law (Rom. 6: 
14). Law is still necessary to overpower 
the criminal who would override the in- 
nocent, but not for the Christian who has 
been inspired by the New Testament and 
aroused by the appeal of the Lord. The 
Old Testament is law; the New is grace. 
The Christian church, with its conditions 
of membership and principles of life, is 
the creation of the New Testament. The 
Old Testament had no Saviour and no 
forgiveness of sin, save the intimation, 
the foregleam, the promise, the type, 
the prophecy, of the New. And we 
shall seek the guidance of the New Tes- 
tament in all the questions that follow 
in this volume. 

Review Questions 

28 (1) How do the Testaments, the 
hemispheres of the Bible, compare in au- 
thority now? 

29 (2) What are some of God's con- 
tracts with men? 

51 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

30 (3) What is the center of the 
Old Testament? 

31 (4) Why have we the New Tes- 
tament? 

32 (5) What proves the superiority 
of the New Testament? 

33 (6) What is the consequence of 
Moses as mediator of the Old, and of 
Christ, of the New Testament? 

34 (7) What is the difference in 
their constitutions? 

35 (8) How is it indicated that the 
Old was local, temporary, and that the 
New is universal, permanent? 

36 (9) How do they contrast in 
their beginnings? 

37 (10) How do they contrast in 
their devolopment? 

38 (11) How do they contrast in 
their conclusion? 

39 (12) What shows their mutual 
corroboration? 

40 (13) Why is the Old Testament 
not authoritative now? 



HI 
THE DISPENSATIONS 

DISPENSATION means, theologically 
(Webster), "a system of principles, 
promises and rules ordained and admin- 
istered ; scheme ; economy ; 
. l J"^ C ^? S . as, the Patriarchal, Mo- 

with Man Ongi- . - ^, . J . J. 

saic and Christian dispen- 
sations." Paul used this 
word to describe Christianity (Eph. 1: 
10), and to depict the work to which he 
was called (Eph. 3:2; Col. 1 : 25). Ever 
since his separation from God by sin, man 
has needed a prophet to teach him, a 
priest to intercede for him and a king to 
rule over him. And this threefold want 
has been provided for in all the dispensa- 
tions. Prior to his alienation from God, 
however, it appears that the Lord taught 
man directly, he required no intercessor 
and Jehovah was his King. But trans- 
gression broke up this communion and 
fellowship. Yet the Father still loved His 
creatures, if possible, more than ever, and 
planned how He might destroy sin and 
bring them back to Himself. 

53 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

Religion is individual and social. But 

in primitive times social life was very 

. .. . simple. There was only 

Simplicity r . t J 

, . ' . , . one organization : namely, 

of the Patriarchal ,, , & ., ' - ,/' 

the home or the family. 

Hence, the Patriarchal 
Dispensation was very elementary and 
free from artificiality. Its basis was the 
marriage covenant: "Therefore shall a 
man leave his father and mother, and 
shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall 
be one flesh" (Gen. 2:24). Marriage, 
originally solemnized by Jehovah, is a 
religious institution, whose purpose is 
that the earth may be occupied and sub- 
dued (Gen. 1:28). And the home, with 
priority over all other establishments, is 
sacred. In the home was the germ from 
which the state and the school and the 
church have grown. 

At first the destiny of humanity was 
achieved through the head of the house- 

The Patriarch hoM > ° Y the P atriarch - 
th N t 1 ^ n( * * n CaSe °^ t ^ ie ^ eatn 

of the father, the first- 
born son was elevated to 
take his place. Sometimes, however, on 
account of the inferiority of the oldest son, 
this birthright was inherited by a wor- 
thier younger son. This exception was 

54 



THE DISPENSATIONS 



made in the case of Cain and Abel, Ish- 
mael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Reuben 
and Joseph, and Manasseh and Ephraim. 
Though sin impaired his faculties, Adam 
remembered what he had learned from 
the Lord. God continued to reveal Him- 
self in visions and dreams. And it be- 
came the duty of the first patriarch to 
instruct the children born to him, in the 
way of Jehovah. This sacred trust passed 
to every father. Cain despised it and 
killed Abel, but God raised up Seth to 
keep His name alive in the earth. And 
from Adam to Abraham was an unbroken 
line of great patriarchs who were true to 
their traditions (Gen. 5: 1-32; 11: 10-26). 
But destiny required more than teach- 
ing. All the children of Adam and Eve, 
«, AJ , who hid from the Lord, 

The Adequacy of . , 

^ r. . • t_ i were sinners, and some- 

the Patriarchal Jt . « « , * i c 

_. ^ thing had to be done for 

Dispensation ,, .° .- 

their guilty consciences. 
Sin cost life, and only blood could atone 
for it. And the patriarchs, whether they 
were conscious of it or not, in offering 
animals in sacrifice to God prefigured 
their Saviour and ours, whose blood only 
can take away sin. This they did for 
their children (Job 1: 1-5), and they in- 
terceded for their friends (Job 42: 7-9). 

55 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

In a world disorganized and distressed 

it was likewise necessary that some one 

under Jehovah should rule, and this also 

the patriarch did (Gen. 18: 19) or his 

successor did (Gen. SO: 15-21). And so 

during the Patriarchal Dispensation the 

people had the knowledge of tradition and 

visions and dreams (Gen. 28: 10-22) and 

the Word of God (Acts 7: 1-7), the altar 

for sacrifice (Gen. 22:9) and worship 

(Gen. 12:8), prayer for intercession 

(Gen. 18: 23-32), thanksgiving (Gen. 24: 

27) and benediction (Gen. 47: 10). 

But the patriarch was not always 

equal to the responsibility of his great au- 

t « t thority to teach and to 
Where It Broke . , ; , i « 

intercede and to rule. 

When he neglected his 
duty, the worship of God fell into decay 
in his house; and when, in spite of warn- 
ing from the faithful (Jude 14, 15), this 
negligence spread to many families, de- 
stroying the home and rotting society, as 
in the time of Noah, Jehovah made one 
man supreme over all and destroyed the 
wicked. And then He began anew to 
people the earth by the descendants from 
this chief patriarch. But society became 
more complex as the race increased in 
number and men began to organize them- 

56 



THE DISPENSATIONS 



selves into tribes and nations. And the 
Lord, foreseeing another great apostasy, 
planned to establish Himself in a great 
nation to battle against evil in a world 
of nations. 

The Devil has wriggled himself into 

every good thing. God made the indi- 

„ -.--*. vidual in His own image 

How Jehovah , -. TT . ...** 

_ . „; ■ and after His own hke- 

Saved His Cause , ., fJ 

ness, but the old serpent 
poisoned his heart, estranged his life and 
planted the seeds of death in him. Jeho- 
vah established the home to work out His 
sacred purpose in this world, but Satan 
taught it lies, prostituted its altar of sac- 
rifice and worship, and lashed it in fury 
amid the waves of destruction. In the 
course of providence, clans and races 
grew, but the great dragon set himself at 
the head of the tribes and dominated the 
nations. And the Lord organized good to 
reinforce the home, to elevate the tribe, 
to cleanse the nation and to save the indi- 
vidual. Since the Devil was operating 
through nations, God, finding none that 
He could use, began to create the greatest 
of all races through the greatest of all 
patriarchs — Abraham. In this world — the 
theater of history — Jehovah has always 
achieved His object through human in- 

57 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

strumentality. He has done many won- 
derful things by individuals, and has 
trained all His great leaders in the home. 
But the time came for a national organi- 
zation to combat evil on a world scale. 

The Patriarchal developed into the 
Jewish, or Mosaic, Dispensation. This 
™. T • u t^. change came gradually, 

The Jewish Dis- ,, & - . i j 

„ though it was marked on 

pensation En- , & ^ - ., ... 

a day. 1 he latter dispen- 

largement of the . . J . r 

„ . , . sation was an enlarge- 
Patnarchal - Jt - ? 

ment of the former; for 

the people called Hebrews after Abraham 
(Gen. 14: 13), Israelites for Jacob, or Is- 
rael (Gen. 32: 28), or Jews after Judah, 
were a nation of families. And this race 
was in its infancy in the time of Abra- 
ham, Isaac and Jacob, who, as patri- 
archs, taught and commanded their house- 
holds and interceded for them. The 
growth of this nation was very slow at 
first. At the time Jacob took his family 
into Egypt, two hundred and fifteen years 
after God had called Abraham, there were 
only seventy persons (Deut. 10: 22). But 
after two hundred and fifteen years more, 
at the time of the deliverance from Egypt, 
there were probably three million ; and the 
national institution was inaugurated at 
Mount Sinai by the giving of the law. But 

58 



THE DISPENSATIONS 



the family worship continued without 
change (Josh. 24: 14, 15), except that the 
males of Abraham's family were circum- 
cised to separate his children from the rest 
of the world. Since during the Patriarchal 
Dispensation there was no organization 
larger than the home, no public teachers, 
common altars or general rules, there was 
no necessity for an initiating or separating 
rite. 

The promise of both the Jewish and 
the Christian Dispensation was given to 
_. „ . ■ . Abraham (Gen. 12: 1-3). 

The Germ of the r™ r • ,t ^ / 

_ . , , „, . 1 he first promise, that he 

Jewish and Chris- « i i i ; 

. ^. . should be a great nation, 

:ian Dispensations « « t i i ■ • 

. , _ . blessed, a blessing to 

in the Promise to jt ' « « , j « • 

AU , those who blessed him 

Abraham - - . 

and a curse to those who 
cursed him, and have a great name, was 
the basis of the former dispensation; and 
the second promise, that in him should 
all the families of the earth be blessed, 
was the basis of the latter. These prom- 
ises were subsequently renewed to Abra- 
ham on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22: 1-18), 
to Isaac (Gen. 26: 1-5) and to Jacob 
(Gen. 28: 10-15). The first was fulfilled 
through the covenant of circumcision and 
the covenant at Mount Sinai. It was 
earthly and temporal. Though it was to 

59 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

prepare for the heavenly kingdom, the 
kingdom of the Jews was of this world. 
The natural always precedes the spiritual 
(1 Cor. 15: 46). And the natural is also 
sacred — the body is for the sake of the 
spirit. 

The Lord extended His dispensation. 

He raised up prophets to teach the nation, 

«■ i- j ^ gave a whole tribe to the 

How God En- & . - , . t 

lar*ed His Dis- P nestl y function and pro- 
vided rulers from another 
tribe. Any Levite de- 
scended through Aaron, properly conse- 
crated, could officiate as priest for his 
brethren. The kings were to come from 
Judah. But the worship of Jehovah in 
the home continued among the Jews 
(Josh. 24: 14, 15), and for the rest of the 
world it was the only authorized service. 
The first two dispensations were political, 
moral and religious, the second being 
modified to meet the more complex rela- 
tionships of life. The Jewish economy 
was a tower of strength to religion, not 
only in the homes of Israel, but also in 
the households of Gentile patriarchs, for 
it wrought mightily against idolatry and 
wickedness in high places. Even before 
its constitution was written on Sinai, the 
vain Pharaoh of the proudest nation in 



THE DISPENSATIONS 



the world was overwhelmed in defeat and 
shame and humiliation by the mighty 
power of Jehovah, which also sent His 
name everywhere and brought His people 
into the limelight. And, besides, the Lord 
was also broadening and deepening the 
foundation for His final scheme of per- 
fect revelation, victorious mediation and 
the glorious rule of love. 

The first two dispensations were typi- 
cal of the third. The faithful patriarchs 

The First Two and HebrCW . P r °P het * 
_. . were representative of 

Dispensations T r - r « 

o u i- a *u Jesus as the final great 

Symbolized the J ,- ., ,. ^ & , 

„ . , authoritative I e a c h e r 

mrd (Heb. 1:1-4). Every 

sacrifice for sin was a signboard on the 
road of life pointing the way to "the 
Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of 
the world," and the river of blood begin- 
ning with the stream from the firstling of 
Abel's flock flowed straight to Calvary. 
And every good sovereign was a picture 
of Him who was to be "King of kings and 
Lord of lords." The sojourn of Israel in 
Egypt and the deliverance therefrom 
were analogous to living in sin and sal- 
vation in Christ, and their life in the 
wilderness was for the admonition of the 
Christian (1 Cor. 10: 1-13). The high 

61 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

priest in the Most Holy Place of the taber- 
nacle or temple, signifying heaven, him- 
self typified the Mediator in the celestial 
realm (Rom. 3: 26; 1 John 2: 1, 2) ; while 
the common priest in the Holy Place, 
symbolizing the church, betokened the 
Christian approaching God through 
Christ (Rev. 1:6). However, the most 
perfect image of our Intercessor and 
Advocate appeared in the Patriarchal 
Era — that wonderful priest and king, 
Melchizedek, to whom even Abraham 
was amenable (Heb. 6:17-7:28). Per- 
haps the division of the kingdom of Is- 
rael, opening the way of captivity and hu- 
miliation, foreshadowed the schism of the 
church, nullifying its witness for Jesus. 

Moreover, the first two economies cre- 
ated a vernacular for the third. They 
™_ xr t.. , * are all written in the 

The Vehicle of « Tj . A 

same language. It is true 
° U \ ^ that the New Testament 

Common to the ., . . 

_. . reads a new meaning into 

D ,spensafons ^ ^ ^ ^ Q & ^ 

explains the New. Words and phrases 
acquire their content of meaning through 
the growth and development of years and 
centuries. And so the language of the 
New Testament is best understood by a 
knowledge of the patriarchs and the 

62 



THE DISPENSATIONS 



Hebrew nation. And this history, yea, all 
history, is marvelously interpreted as the 
providence of God. 

Each dispensation of God has a time 

limit. The Patriarchal Age began with 

_,. _ . ' , Adam and continued 

1 ime .Limit or r . t , , 

twenty-five hundred 
_. . years, ending with the 

Dispensation J . . . 9 . r 

giving of the law or 
Moses at Mount Sinai. The Jewish 
scheme, beginning with this event, ended 
fifteen hundred years later with the death 
of Christ on the cross. And after an 
interregnum of fifty days the Christian 
Dispensation began with the descent of 
the Holy Spirit into the hearts of the 
Apostles on the day of Pentecost; and it 
will close when Christ, having wrought 
actual universal domain, with every 
enemy beneath His feet, "shall deliver up 
the kingdom to God," "that God may be 
all in air (1 Cor. 15:20-28). 

Christianity, rooted and imaged in the 

two preceding dispensations, is the acme 

s f 11 °^ God's scheme for man, 

a va ion u y ^ , ^ salvation fully 

Wrought Out in r , A A T J 

Christ wrought out. Jesus 

Christ is the Supreme 

Prophet to reveal the Father, the High 

Priest to atone for sin and the Absolute 

5 63 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

King to rule humanity. He is God and 
man in one. He controls by the intelli- 
gence of faith, the inspiration of hope and 
the impulse of love. He is the fulfillment 
of the second promise to Abraham (Gal. 
3:8). The basis of His reign is the New 
Covenant (Heb. 8: 8-13). The education 
of the patriarch or prophet, the entreaty 
of the priest, high or common, and the 
dominion of the king, great or small, 
were vital only as they pointed to Him, 
through whom alone all the faithful of 
all dispensations are saved. His kingdom 
is of heaven, to which He proposes to 
make this world tributary and subsidiary. 
He has abrogated no essential principle 
of any preceding age. He has only dis- 
placed the shadow with the substance, the 
type with the antitype, the image with the 
original ! His system of education begins 
with the natural relationships of the home 
(Eph. 6: 1-4), and is mightily reinforced 
by the church and the state and the school 
and the press, great institutions that have 
sprung up by his influence. 

Great progress is being made under 
«. ^ ., . , Christ. The Christian 

The Outlook for n , ,. . , ,- 

A . „ , Dispensation is less than 

the Future F , , t , 

two thousand years old, 
but the world has gone forward im- 

64 



THE DISPENSATIONS 



measurably. But the Devil who slew the 
individual, destroyed the home and alien- 
ated the nation in former dispensations — 
the same old Devil — crept into the church 
not long after its establishment and 
turned it into an instrument for his own 
use. And there came another apostasy. 
But the light did not go out, though the 
church yet limps along in the weakness 
and shame of faction. However, there 
are many signs that the Lord's prayer for 
the unity of His followers shall be an- 
swered. And when the fullness of the 
Gentiles is come in, Israel shall be re- 
stored (Rom. 11:25-27). Then the 
mighty genius of the Jews as propagan- 
dists will be available to the kingdom of 
the Lord. And Jesus shall marshal His 
united army against the enemy in high 
places and low. Then skepticism will evap- 
orate, infidelity will disappear, unbelief 
will disperse, indifference will die, and 
Satan shall get off this earth, and, like the 
dog that he is, go howling in chains to the 
bottomless pit! 

Review Questions 

41 ( 1 ) What threefold want, caused 
by sin, made impossible the originally di- 
rect divine dealing with man? 

65 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

42 (2) What accounts for the sim- 
plicity of the Patriarchal Dispensation? 

43 (3) Why was the patriarch the 
natural leader? 

44 (4) To what three functions of 
the patriarch was the adequacy of the 
Patriarchal Dispensation due ? 

45 (5) Where did it break down? 

46 (6) How did Jehovah save His 
cause? 

47 (7) How was the Jewish Dispen- 
sation enlargement of the Patriarchal? 

48 (8) How is it shown that the 
germ of the Jewish and of the Christian 
Dispensation was in the promise to Abra- 
ham? 

49 (9) How did God enlarge His 
dispensation? 

50 (10) How did the first two dis- 
pensations symbolize the third? 

51 (11) Why is the vehicle of 
thought common to the dispensations? 

52 (12) What is the time limit of 
each dispensation? 

53 (13) Why is salvation fully 
zvr ought out in Christ? 

54 (14) What \$ the outlook for the 
future? 



66 



IV 
RELIGION 

THE Bible is remarkable for its re- 
straint of speech — for what it does 
not say. It is more interesting than the 
fabrications of man, but, 
e lgio, e strangely silent at the 

Fundamental • , <■ i • 

, , point of human curiosity, 

Purpose of the i, , , ~ ,. A J j 

B>b it cannot be fiction. And 

the reason for this re- 
serve, common to the Testaments and to 
the books of the Bible, is the strict adher- 
ence to the fundamental purpose of relig- 
ion. Naming only a few individuals of 
the Patriarchal Age, whose acceptance 
or rejection of God's plan made their lives 
pertinent to this primary theme and rep- 
resentative of their contemporaries not 
mentioned in the sacred narrative, Old 
Testament history, beginning with the 
Jewish scheme, is limited to the He- 
brews, through whom the world has re- 
ceived its ultimate religion — Christianity. 
And the biography of our Lord, four 
times told, and echoed and re-echoed in all 
the other books of the New Testament, as 

67 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 



well as foretold in the prophecy of the 
Old, is given wholly to the events in His 
life of religious significance. The curtain 
that hides His early life in obscurity is 
pulled aside one time by Luke that we 
may see in the boy in the temple the com- 
ing teacher of men, but nothing is written 
by any writer of His life as a carpenter. 
Religion has three primary elements: 
(1) Man is conscious of his own exist- 
_,, _, _, . ence. He may not know 

The Three Pri- « « J 

t whencehecameor 

mary Elements of t ., . , , , 

. . whither he goes, but he 

does know that he is here. 
Whatever his theories may be, life is his 
possession, of which he must of necessity 
make some disposition. (2) Man is 
aware that somebody else exists, wiser, 
mightier, higher than himself. He sees 
that without any advice from him- 
self, without any thought of his own 
heart, without any plan of his own brain, 
without any power of his own weak arm, 
"seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, 
and summer and winter, and day and 
night" (Gen. 8: 22) follow each other in 
regular succession; he gazes in rapturous 
wonder at the Sovereign of night and at 
the myriads of stars, and marvels at the 
Monarch of day as, shaking off the sleep 



RELIGION 



of the night, he climbs to the zenith above 
the mountains that pierce the clouds to 
greet him, flooding the world with light, 
and as, bathing himself in a sea of glory 
golden and silvery, he falls to rest in the 
arms of night; he beholds the cataract, 
roaring, rushing, booming, to the depths 
below, and the rapids, dashing, splashing, 
spraying, rolling, tumbling, leaping, to 
their level; he feels the stagger of the 
earth as it hurls clouds of smoke and 
belches waves of fire from its interior; he 
marks the rising and receding tide and 
hears the roaring sea; he beholds the lily 
in greater glory than Solomon's; he 
draws his sustenance from the richness 
of the valley, and protects his body by 
material already provided; he reads the 
mystery of his own being unraveled in 
the Bible, and discovers his ideal in the 
perfect Man, and he is indeed a fool if 
he does not exclaim, "God is" (Ps. 14: 1 ; 
Heb. 11:6). (3) The intuition of man 
says that there is some connection be- 
tween God and himself. No man can get 
away from God save by the utter destruc- 
tion of the inner light of his own con- 
science in sin, for that which is known of 
God is manifest in man and unto him, 
and His everlasting power and divinity, 

69 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

though invisible, are perceived through 
the things that are made (Rom. 1 : 18-22). 
Now, the infinite superiority of Chris- 
tianity lies in its revelation of God and in 
^, . its interpretation of the 

The Superiority 1 . {,•■•, r a 

t ou . . . . relationship between God 

of Christianity , t ,1 • 

_ j, and man. In the lmaei- 

over Other . r , . , & 

Reii ions nation of his own heart, 

deadened and paralyzed 
by sin, man has conceived God to be a 
monster, a cruel and heartless tyrant ; but 
the religion of Jesus Christ declares that 
God is love (1 John 4:8). The world 
could never know God by its own wisdom 
(1 Cor. 1:21), but Jehovah gave such 
pictures of Himself through good men as 
the patriarchs and the Jews could appre- 
ciate, and in due time drew His perfect 
likeness in His Son. And when the man 
Jesus said, "I and the Father are one" 
(John 10:31), He satiated the human 
heart beyond all power to think, imagine 
or hope! The relationship between God 
and man is that they are one! Yet, why 
should we marvel, seeing that the Lord 
made man in His own image and after 
His own likeness in the beginning? At 
his worst man is like the Devil, but at his 
best he is God in the flesh. Endowed with 
the attributes of his Creator and Father, 

70 



RELIGION 



man is the finite of which God is the Infi- 
nite : he is Jehovah in miniature, and under 
the principles of the Christian religion the 
scale of his being will enlarge forever. 

The religion of Christ is beautiful and 
attractive for its simplicity. It is free 
_. , _ . b . from the ceremony and 

Simple Embodi- ^ r , . . r ^ r > 

. „. . . the formality of the jew s 

ment of Christian ,. . -,-/ J A 

-. . . , religion. But no system 

Principles ,, P . . , J 

that ministers to men in 

the world of time and things and sense 
can dispense wholly with the embodiment 
of its principles. And the Christian relig- 
ion has a few simple ordinances or insti- 
tutions — baptism for the believing, peni- 
tent sinner and the Lord's Supper and the 
Lord's Day for the Christian — all of 
which, as we shall see, are perfectly articu- 
lated with the needs of the spirit. The soul 
tires of useless formality. Any religion 
weighted down by ceremony will certainly 
be discarded. And here is one point of 
excellence that shall make the faith of 
Jesus universal. 

Happily for us, religion is defined by 

the sacred writer : "Pure religion and un- 

, _ . . . defiled before our God 

James Definition 11^,1 • ..i • ^ • *a. 

f and r ather is this, to visit 

the fatherless and widows 
in their affliction, and to keep oneself 
71 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

unspotted from the world" (Jas. 1:27). 
James refers the matter to God for cor- 
rect definition, which is practical rather 
than theoretical. Theology is of the in- 
tellect, religion is of the heart and life; 
theology is technical, religion is virtual. 
Moreover, religion as the service of God 
is the service of man. None can minister 
personally to "the God that made the 
world and all things therein; he, being 
Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in 
temples made with hands; neither is he 
served by men's hands, as though he 
needed anything, seeing he himself giveth 
to all life, and breath, and all things" 
(Acts 17:24, 25). But the Lord's little 
ones are in need, and whoever blesses 
them ministers unto Him (Matt. 25: 31- 
46). And in rendering this service the 
Christian must keep himself free from 
worldliness. He cannot love both God 
and the world (1 John 2: 15-17). The 
world, which must pass away, is un- 
worthy of his devotion and reverence and 
unable to supply his eternal need (Luke 
16: 1-13). But God shall bountifully 
provide for his wants here (Matt. 6: 33), 
and hereafter receive him "into the eternal 
tabernacle" — into his everlasting home. 
And so religion is not a mere sentiment 



RELIGION 



due to fleshly sensation or to psycholog- 
ical condition, but it is the supreme prin- 
ciple of life. We do not get religion; we 
live it. 

Religion is the great conservator of 

life. Opening the door to the wisdom of 

.. . „ God (Jas. 1:5-7), it is 

Religion Con- ,, KJ . J1 

T ., , the greatest insurance 

serves Life and . °. ,, - t1 r * 

•kk against the folly of de- 

Equahzes Men P . Air • i 

struction. And, furnish- 
ing soil for faith, it grows character of 
oak, which the winds of doubt can neither 
sway nor break. The humble Christian, 
though he may be illiterate and have ac- 
cess to no books but the Bible, has more 
of the wisdom from above, which is pure, 
peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, 
full of mercy and good fruits, without 
variance and hypocrisy (Jas. 3: 17), than 
the blatant critic, though of the biggest 
schools of earth, who presumes to say that 
the Bible is not the Word of God. Be- 
sides, the religion of the Nazarene equal- 
izes men. It provides a high estate for 
the lowly and humiliates the rich, bidding 
them both rejoice (Jas. 1:9-11). Relig- 
ion is the glass through which man comes 
to see with his own eyes that the acci- 
dents of birth or race or station count 
for nothing to lift him up above his fel- 

73 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 



lows or to cast him down beneath them. 
Moreover, our religion turns tempta- 
tion into a blessing (Jas. 1:2-4, 12-18). 
_, .. . „ Satan is abroad in the 

Religion Counter- ,, (( , - 

acts Temptation ^ | 01n f, t0 and fr ° 

in it and walking up and 
down in it" (Job 1:6, 7), and he thrusts 
temptation before every human being. 
Not even God could live in the flesh and 
escape him (Matt. 4:1). But Jesus knew 
how to resist the Devil. And He has pro- 
vided us a religion that enables us to 
endure temptation, and promotes our 
growth through its very struggle. Our 
religion also fortifies us by warning that 
the enemy can succeed only through the 
weakness of lust. It is the Old Serpent 
that entices, but God will not suffer him 
to go beyond our strength (1 Cor. 10: 
13). And if we go with the Devil it is 
because we want to. Neither God nor 
Satan can take man unless he is willing to 
go. But they are both calling him, and 
he must of necessity make a choice and go 
with one of them. But the Lord is not in 
the business of tempting men to sin, and 
He is in nowise responsible for the evil 
that is in the world. He warned His 
children against sin, knowing that it 
would bring death as the climax of 

74 



RELIGION 



calamities, and He moves heaven and 
earth to bring man back to Himself. Not 
only does He not allure into the wrong 
way, but He gives, or inspires the gift of, 
every good thing; and, bringing us forth 
of His own will by the word of truth, He 
makes us the firstfruits of His creatures. 
And so, strengthening weakness, relig- 
ion gives self-control (Jas. 1:19-26). 
The Christian is swift to 
_, ec . a se c ir hear, but slow to speak 

Develops Self- , ' , . r jt 

and slower to wrath, 
knowing that wrath 
works evil. Putting away filthiness and 
wickedness and receiving with meekness 
the implanted Word, he saves his soul. 
But self-command is active as well as 
passive. And he who, having heard the 
Word, fails to do it, is like a man seeing 
himself in a mirror and forgetting how 
he looked; but he who looks into the law 
of liberty, and does according to its teach- 
ing and inspiration, lives a blessed life. 
The Christian religion, therefore, bridling 
the tongue to hold it back from foolish 
speech and wicked words, purifying the 
heart for the occupancy of the Word of 
God and ruling the life both to restrain 
from transgression and to impel to right- 
eousness, gives complete self-mastery. 

75 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

And here is the secret of its progress and 
the reason why it shall ultimately displace 
all false religions and conquer the world. 
Selfishness is subdued by the great mas- 
ter King of humanity, who is destined to 
triumph through His servants. None can 
rule others who are themselves rebellious 
toward God, tyrannical over man, uncon- 
trollable, amenable to nothing but their 
own whim and caprice and selfishness, 
though (the shame of it!) under the guise 
of religion. They only cow and crush 
and ruin, they do not encourage and de- 
velop and inspire ; without love to attract, 
they repel by hatred. 

Religion is of the whole life — the 

warp and woof and coloring. It is not a 

„ ,. . . garment to be worn on 

Religion the ~ j j 1 «j «j 

_ . ™ Sunday and laid aside six 

Dominant Ele- * / it « T . . 

, _., days in the week. It is 

ment of Life - J £ ,, 

the very texture of the 
soul. Knowing that man is naturally re- 
ligious, Satan leads him into the atmos- 
phere of morbid superstition, so that he 
gropes in the dark and dies in ignorance. 
But Jesus brings us the light, that 
through our innate religious impulse we 
may climb up to God. However, time is 
a long road, checkered with valleys and 
hills and mountains, over which the race 

76 



RELIGION 



moves slowly and painfully. And never, 
till all our institutions, as well as indi- 
vidual lives, are saturated with His Spirit, 
shall the world see the full glory of the 
Christian religion. But the journey is 
becoming more rapid now. Already the 
home and the church and the school and 
the state are constitutionally Christian in 
our great country, and business is becom- 
ing so. More people are accepting the 
Lord than ever before, and the kindness 
and the courtesy of the Christian religion 
is taking hold of the masses. 

Rascally men who misrepresented the 

people have been hurled from their high 

a a «ni tut i places, and our great 

And Will Make r . °, 

statesmen are preachers 
veryt mg ^ ^ e homely morality 

Sacred and Noth- r . t j 1 j r i • j 

„ . of the good old-fashioned 

mg Secular i- • n- 1 

religion. Dishonest men 
of high finance or big business — some 
have died in shame and others are living 
in disgrace. And the day must surely 
come when business, large or small, shall 
be run on Christian principles. War 
is being waged on organized evil as never 
before, and the saloon, with all its devilish 
tribe, shall die ! It cannot live in the light 
of the religion of our Lord. God speed 
the time when the atmosphere into which 

77 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

little children shall be born and in which 
they must grow up shall be wholly Chris- 
tian, so that every influence that reaches 
them shall bring them through the instinct 
of religion to Christ and lead them always 
closer to God. And then nothing will be 
secular, but everything sacred, as the true 
religion forms the character and domi- 
nates the entire life. Religion must be 
perennial and universal, to be natural and 
sweet. To limit it to times and places 
takes the spirit out of its form, and de- 
stroys the halo of life. 

Review Questions 

55 (1) How is it seen that religion 
is the fundamental purpose of the Bible ? 

56 (2) What are the three primary 
elements of religion? 

57 (3) What is the superiority of 
Christianity over other religions? 

58 (4) In what three institutions 
have we the simple embodiment of Chris- 
tian principles? 

59 (5) What is involved in James' 
definition of religion? 

60 (6) How does this religion con- 
serve life and equalize men? 

61 (7) How does religion counter- 
act temptation? 

78 



RELIGION 



62 (8) How does it develop self- 
mastery? 

63 (9) Why is religion the domi- 
nant element of life? 

64 (10) Will it make everything 
sacred and nothing secular? 



V 

THE LAW 

LAW means (Webster) "rule of being 
or of conduct, established by an 
authority able to enforce its will; a con- 

Definition and trol J in g regulation; the 

A*. m_ r mode or order accord- 
Attributes of , . , 

. mg to which an agent 

or a power acts." But 

David gives more than a definition; he 

names the great attributes of law: 

"The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring 

the soul : 
The testimony of Jehovah is sure, making 

wise the simple. 
The precepts of Jehovah are right, rejoic- 
ing the heart : 
The commandment of Jehovah is pure, 

enlightening the eyes. 
The fear of Jehovah is clean, enduring 

for ever: 
The ordinances of Jehovah are true, and 

righteous altogether ,, (Ps. 19: 7-9). 

Law is absolutely necessary. Without 
law there would be disintegration, an- 
archy, death. But law, devoid of person- 

80 



THE LAW 



ality, is wholly dependent on the Power 

back of and in it for enforcement; and all 

mt XT . law relates to God as the 

The Necessity ^ , £ . , 

j i. ^ j supreme Ruler of the uni- 
and the Depend- t^i 

rT verse, lhe government 

ence of Law , T « « ?. < 

of Jehovah is always 

called a kingdom, never a republic or a 

democracy, because there can be only one 

head. And God makes His law dominant 

over all transgressors. The ascendancy 

of law is proof of the Lord; if He were 

not, law could be set aside with impunity. 

Yea, nothing could be if God were not, 

who created all things and governs all 

things by the power of His law; and He 

will not, He cannot, abdicate the throne. 

And so law is the will of God. But, 

since man could not discover the will of 

Law is the Will T G ° d - \ ™ as necessary for 
- - , T . Jehovah to make it known 

of God, Inherent ' , . - ,- -n^i • 

and Merciful ' a Bible IS 

the revelation of the law 
of the Lord for the human race. The 
first laws were few and simple, but illus- 
trative of God's purpose. Man did not 
die merely because Jehovah said he 
would; but God revealed to Adam that, 
according to the law of his being, the 
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good 
and evil would plant the seeds of death 

81 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

in him, and commanded him not to eat 
that fruit because He wanted him to live. 
But as soon as man sinned, the law of 
mercy became operative to redeem him 
from eternal ruin. Sin could not be 
treated lightly. It cost life, and nothing 
but the sacrifice of life — the shedding of 
blood — could take it away. During all 
the ages before the "due time" to send 
His Son as the only adequate sacrifice, 
God met the demands of the case by com- 
manding men to offer slain animals for 
their sins. And these typical sacrifices 
have enabled the whole world the better 
to understand the enormity of sin and 
appreciate the death on the cross. The 
law of sacrifice still prevails; but since 
the blood of Jesus atoned for sin, our 
offerings are to be living, never dead 
(Rom. 12:1, 2). 

God has always revealed His will to 

meet the needs of man. He created Adam 

~ * « , j a social creature, and, 

God Revealed « . « . « 

marking his unhappmess 

His Law as , 1 1 « 11 

, alone, made him a nelp- 

ar ^ S e 1 j emg meet, and established the 

Demanded « ' - . / /-* n 

law of marriage (Gen. 2: 
18-24). The world was too large for one 
man and one woman, and through the 
union of male and female the race was to 

82 



THE LAW 



multiply to replenish and subdue the earth 
(Gen. 1:27, 28). The law of the Lord 
still governs the institution of marriage, 
and woe to them that break it; but in the 
resurrection life there will be no necessity 
for this union (Matt. 22:23-30). For 
his well-being, God gave Noah a law as to 
his food, and a law to protect his life 
from the murderer, that "whoso sheddeth 
man's blood, by man shall his blood be 
shed: for in the image of God made he 
man" (Gen. 9: 1-7), which has never 
been repealed. And the law of circum- 
cision was designed for the enlargement 
of Abraham into a great nation, through 
which Jehovah could meet the needs of 
the world (Gen. 17). 

And in the law of Moses we see this 

same accommodation of the will of God 

to meet the needs of His 

» ff f W ? people. While the consti- 

Moses Is also f M . r , ,, . , . ,, 

A , t . 4 T , tution of this law is the 

Adapted to Israel ^ ^ , /T ^ 

Ten Commandments (Ex. 
20: 1-17), yet, as we have seen, life had 
become complex with the growth of the 
nation, and many rules had to be given 
governing the people in all their relation- 
ships. And so the law of Moses was 
civil, criminal, judicial, constitutional, ec- 
clesiastical and ceremonial. However, it 

83 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

was incidental to the covenant made with 
Abraham, the fundamental thing that 
God was developing, and it was merely 
"added because of transgressions, till the 
seed should come to whom the promise 
hath been made" (Gal. 3: 15-22). Natu- 
rally enough, since it was the law of God 
to govern His chosen people, the nations 
of earth have discovered in it the basic 
principles of government. But the law of 
Moses was a local system designed for a 
people living in a comparatively small 
country, and its primary religious obliga- 
tions were addressed exclusively to the 
Jews. At the time it was given, the He- 
brews, without any experience in self- 
government, were just being organized 
into a nation, and their duties had to be 
minutely prescribed. They were hard to 
control, and the Lord gave them the law 
through Moses to restrain them from sin. 
Whether they obeyed it or not, every pro- 
hibitory command pointed out a place of 
danger along their way, warning them 
against it, and each positive charge was a 
call of God to keep in the straight road. 
The law of Moses has been fulfilled. 
Or, to put the matter differently, it served 
its purpose and ceased to be authoritative. 
The condition that gave rise to it has 

84 



THE LAW 



long since passed away. It is obligatory 
on nobody on the face of the earth to 
A j , keep the law of Moses 

And Surrendered r\r ^.i 

A A . . . now. Of course, the 

Authority in , , . . 1 ' 

Ti „ .„., eternal principles upon 

Its Fulfillment i • i •- il j \.-n 

which it was based still 
obtain, but as a system to govern life 
it has ceased to be. Jesus Christ, the 
Substance shadowed in the law and the 
Antitype of its many types, fulfilled it to 
the letter (Matt. 5: 17, 18; Luke 24:44- 
49). He lived all His life under the law, 
being the only man that ever kept it per- 
fectly, and He nailed it, even the Ten 
Commandments as a system, to the cross 
(Col. 2: 14). And He is Himself "the 
end of the law unto righteousness to 
every one that believeth ,, (Rom. 10:4). 
This law had serious limitations. It 
was the best law possible in its time, but 

it w Edu ** was t0 * eac * t0 some " 
, A « " thing much better. Its 

cative, but Sen- - . 7 r - - 

. _ . . . chief function was edu- 

ously Limited . . ^ . . 

cation ; it was the tutor to 
bring the Jews to Christ (Gal. 3:24). 
The Jewish nation, under the teaching of 
false leaders in the seat of Moses, failed 
miserably in the school of the law; but a 
few choice spirits, accepting the inter- 
pretation and the fulfillment of the law 

85 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

by Jesus Himself, received their diplomas 
and were promoted into the great uni- 
versity of the Lord. The law itself was 
good, but the flesh was too weak to keep 
it (Rom. 8: 3). With a sinful man for 
mediator and priest, no blood but that of 
bulls and goats, no inspiration of a per- 
fect life and no satisfactory revelation of 
love, the law of Moses could make no 
man perfect (Heb. 10: 1). And Jesus, 
honoring Moses and making him greater 
than ever by fulfilling the law named for 
him, set the law of Moses aside for His 
own gospel. 

And in the Sermon on the Mount, 

which might be called the constitution of 

- , . the gospel, as the Ten 

Contrast of the r* ' J 

Commandments are 
called the constitution 
of the law of Moses, 
Jesus shows, as it is shown nowhere else, 
the inadequacy of the law, in the light of 
His own luminous principles (Matt. 5: 
17-46). The law prohibited murder; the 
gospel forbids hate or even disrespect. 
The law forbade adultery; the gospel 
exposes lust as the beginning of this 
crime. The law, on account of hard- 
ness of heart (Matt. 19:8), allowed di- 
vorce; the gospel recognizes only one 

86 



THE LAW 



thing — fornication, in its very nature 
violation of the marriage vow — as suffi- 
cient cause to break up the home. The 
law demanded the keeping of oaths; the 
gospel prohibits swearing by anything at 
all and commands plain, simple, truthful 
speech. The law permitted retaliation; 
the gospel requires good for evil. The 
law commanded love toward neighbors, 
but hatred toward enemies; the gospel 
demands love for enemies and prayer for 
persecutors. In a word, the law dealt 
with the outward act; the gospel discov- 
ers the inward impulse both in its effect 
on the heart in which it originates and in 
its result on those toward whom it is 
directed. No man can affect or hate or 
lust without working irreparable injury 
to his own soul, though he be guilty of 
no trespass. 

But the gospel is law, yea, under this, 

the Christian, dispensation, it is the law. 

«^ ~ , , Paul calls it "the law of 

The Gospel the ,, . ., - «. r . ™ . , 

_ _ , the spirit of life in Christ 

Supreme Law of T »/t» oo\ 

L . fe Jesus" (Rom. 8:2); 

James refers to it as "the 
perfect law, the law of liberty" (Jas. 1: 
25) ; and John sums it up as the com- 
mandment to believe in Jesus and love 
one another (1 John 3: 23). Though the 

87 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

law of Moses "was unto life," in human 
experience it became "unto death" be- 
cause of the law or the lawlessness of sin 
(Rom. 7:7-25). But the gospel, whose 
Creator and Revealer defeated the devil 
in life and overcame him in his den of 
death and "knew what was in man" 
(John 2: 25), by its simple faith and liv- 
ing hope and conquering love, inspires the 
Christian to glorify the good and shame 
the evil out of life. At the giving of the 
law of Moses three thousand were slain 
(Ex. 32: 28), but at the first gospel invi- 
tation three thousand were made alive 
(Acts 2:41). That the sinner, in order 
to be saved from his sins, must believe 
with his whole heart in Jesus, repent of 
his rebellion against the law of God, 
make a public confession of his faith and 
be baptized "into the name of the Father 
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," 
is not only gospel, Scriptural, but it is 
also psychological, in harmony with 
the law of man's mind and being. God 
loves all men, but only those who choose 
to be are saved. And without faith 
in its essential elements of penitence 
and obedience to bring the sinner into 
co-operation with the Lord and to 
accept His gift, salvation would be 

88 



THE LAW 



purely arbitrary, mechanical, impossible. 

Jesus, living and dying under the law 

of Moses, not only kept that law in every 

t sx. ™ particular, but at the same 

Jesus the Master f. TT .„ a. j • tt- 

f All Law illustrated in His 

own life the higher law 
of the gospel. And he never made the 
gospel authoritative over the lives of men 
till He had incarnated it in Himself. He 
not only illuminated by His perfect obedi- 
ence all revealed law, but, reaching by 
His divine power into the realm whose 
law is not yet made known to man, He 
made water blush to wine, quelled the 
storm, walked the waves, laid bare the 
secret thoughts of the heart in spite of 
concealment, gave release to the captives 
of the Devil, eyes to the blind, ears to the 
deaf, feet to the lame, bread to the 
hungry, life to the dead! Always submis- 
sive to the Father in thought and word 
and deed, He wrought miracles, which 
are beyond our power to understand or 
explain or reproduce, in harmony with 
the law of God. Any man can hold gravi- 
tation in abeyance by supporting a stone 
in his hand. Jesus transcended natural 
law. Moreover, while Jesus gave His 
time and energy and thought to the 
exemplification and the propagation of 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

religious law, fundamental to the salva- 
tion of man from sin and to his happiness 
here and hereafter, He had the power to 
know all law. But He left the discovery 
of the New World to Columbus, printing 
to Gutenberg, steam to Watt, gravity to 
Newton, electricity to Franklin and Edi- 
son, and health to the noble physicians of 
the world. Since His day man has un- 
locked the door to many of the secrets of 
nature, but more are yet behind the key. 
The gospel is perfect as law because 
of its liberty. Leading man through 

-,. r . x , God's picture-gallery in 
The Gospel the - ^.K , fe , J ,. 

- . ~ , the Bible to show him 

Only Guarantee of , . , . , 

F . what havoc sin has 

wrought in the world, re- 
vealing the abounding love of God and 
making faithfulness the ruling passion of 
life, the gospel leaves the Christian a free 
man in the Lord. And it gives him 
great insight into the question of right 
and wrong, so that he does not need a 
long list of rules, such as Moses gave, to 
guide him. All he has to do, in case of 
question or perplexity, is to go back to 
the life and Spirit of his Exemplar and 
to His authorized teachers, the Apostles. 
He is a sorry Christian who needs the 
Ten Commandments to restrain him. We 

90 



THE LAW 



"are not under law, but under grace" 
(Rom. 6: 14). None but the murderer 
is under the law "Thou shalt not kill"; 
the Christian, subject to the high law of 
love, would not kill if this prohibitory- 
statute did not exist. Freedom is not 
lawlessness, anarchy. It is cohesion, 
subordination to love, the highest law 
of God. 

Love is life; hate is death (1 John 3: 

14). The law of love in the gospel is 

. ^ , to bind the race together 

Love the Only . T ° , 

« , , , T ., as a unit. Love makes 

Safeguard of Life ;1 , Mir 

the saved responsible for 

and Happiness - « 1 1 n i • 

the lost, and shall bring 
all that believe in Jesus together in one 
family of God, whether patriarchs, Jews 
or Christians, whether on earth or in 
heaven. Love measures greatness by 
service, and opens the door to happiness, 
which neither Solomon nor Alexander 
nor Napoleon, nor any other of the most 
highly gifted and materially favored of 
history, could unlock. When our Lord 
was here, men in their blindness thought 
this law very inferior; some scoff at it 
now, and many fall short of it. But the 
day shall yet dawn and flash its light 
around the world. Nations are discover- 
ing in the gospel better principles of gov- 

91 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

ernment than Moses ever gave, and men 
are inspired with a passion for the right- 
eousness of God (Rom. 3: 21-30). Earth 
already joins heaven in the proclamation 
that Jesus is supreme over Moses, Elijah- 
all (Matt. 17:1-8; Phil. 2:5-11); and 
the world resounds with His praise. 
Time will overcome all delinquency, and 
swing His perfect theory into universal 
practice. 

Review Questions 

65 (1) What is the definition and 
what are the attributes of law? 

66 (2) What is the necessity and 
what is the dependence of law? 

67 (3) Why is law in the Bible, 
as the will of God, inherent and merci- 
ful? 

68 (4) How is it shown that God 
revealed His law as man's well-being 
demanded? 

69 (5) How is it seen that the law 
of Moses was also adapted to Israel? 

70 (6) To whom did this law sur- 
render authority in its fulfillment? 

71 (7) How was it educative, but 
seriously limited? 

72 (8) What is the contrast of the 
law and the gospel? 

92 



THE LAW 



73 (9) Why is the gospel the su- 
preme law of life? 

74 (10) How do we know that Jesus 
was the Master of all law? 

75 (11) Why is the gospel the only 
guarantee of freedom? 

76 (12) Why is love the only safe- 
guard of life and happiness? 



98 



VI 

SIN 

IT is evident to the most superficial that 
something is wrong in this world. 
Man's life at the best is stressed by storm 
o. T ^ t>v u. and conflict, embittered 

Sin Is the Blight , «. .' , 

r ^ «r m by disappointment and 

of the World J * i. j 

sorrow, and obscured 
and apparently ended by disease and 
death. Brutes, losing their natural fear 
and dread of the superior human animal 
(Gen. 9:2), and abnormal with rage, be- 
come formidable enemies of life to slay 
both man and beast. The ground, cursed 
and poisoned, produces weeds and thorns 
and thistles (Gen. 3: 17, 18), unfit for 
use, stubborn of destruction and hideous 
to see, where only food and clothing and 
beauty should grow. Yea, the whole cre- 
ation, groaning and travailing in pain 
(Rom. 8:22), has lost its equilibrium. 
And here, as wherever it speaks, the voice 
of the Bible is authoritative and supreme, 
because it is the highest and the best 
and the most satisfactory. It ac- 
counts for this universal distress by one 



SIN 

little word of three letters — s-i-n, sin. 

The question of sin involves that of 
the Devil and hell. It appears that sin 
Q . . f originated in heaven by 
" gm ( the rebellion of the great 
dragon, "the old serpent, 
he that is called the Devil and Satan, the 
deceiver of the whole world," who pre- 
cipitated war in heaven (Rev. 12:7-9), 
and who, "being puffed up," was con- 
demned (1 Tim. 3:6) and cast "down to 
the earth." God created all things good, 
very good; but the Devil, originally an 
angel of light, by the abuse of his power 
to choose, did violence to the will of God 
and the law of his own being and made 
himself the Devil he is. Jehovah pro- 
duced a perfect being in Adam; but, 
through the subtle influence of the Devil, 
man chose wrong instead of right, and 
made himself a sinner. As we have al- 
ready seen, law, which is the will of God, 
must of necessity prevail. And the angels 
that sinned (1 Pet. 2:4), or "kept not 
their first estate" (Jude 6), were cast out 
of heaven by no arbitrary edict of the 
Lord, but the inevitable result of their 
transgression was separation from God 
and all that obeyed His law. 

Heaven and hell are opposite ex- 

7 95 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

tremes; each is antipodal to the other. 
Heaven could not be heaven with rebel- 
„ . „,. lion in it, and hell could 

Heaven and Hell . , « A . . , ,. 

d fi d n w obedience 

c in it. If all men violated 

all the time the law of 
Jehovah, this world would be hell, and it 
is hell in proportion as men live in sin. 
If every human being were in perfect 
harmony with the will of God, this world 
would be heaven, and it is heaven in the 
ratio of our realization of the ideal of 
Jesus Christ. Heaven is subjection to 
the Lord, perfect obedience to law, uni- 
versal harmony, glorious peace, exulting 
joy, eternal happiness, abounding riches, 
everlasting life; hell is damnable selfish- 
ness, disintegrating anarchy, grating dis- 
cord, excruciating pain, internal and ex- 
ternal war, appalling misery, dire distress, 
insatiable want, dying life, living death! 

The Devil is an entity, a real person, 
actually existing. Everybody knows by 
„,, A , .. , his own experience, as 

The Actuality of „ t 1 • , j i_ 

the Devil as ^ history and by 

observation, that evil is, 
for the whole race is smitten. But there 
is no such thing as mere influence. All 
force or power, every operating energy, 
whether traceable by man to its source or 



SIN 

not, in the last analysis, goes back to the 
person from whom it emanated. There- 
fore, good could not be if God were not, 
and evil could not be if the Devil were 
not: neither the one nor the other, ab- 
stractly considered, can create itself or 
project itself into life. Strike an o out 
of good and you have its original source — 
God; prefix d to evil and you have writ- 
ten its creator — Devil. The Devil was 
real to Jesus, who always referred to him 
as a person (John 8: 44). And Satan, by 
creation angelic, superior to man (Heb. 
2:7, 9), is a spiritual being, and, though 
fallen to the depths of hell, he "fashioned 
himself into an angel of light" (2 Cor. 
11: 14). 

Everything that God made was very 

good (Gen. 1:31). But the Devil made 

„» „ r . , man bad, cursed the soil, 

"The Works of . ,' . 1 ' 

th d *r poisoned the atmosphere, 
filled the environment of 
life with disease and death and disturbed 
the whole creation, so that only God is 
good now (Luke 18: 19). Satan com- 
panied with the sons of God in the days 
of Job, no doubt deceiving them, but 
Jehovah exposed him (Job 6: 6, 7). He 
is busy now as he was then, and with 
many other fallen spirits under him and 

97 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

wicked men trailing after him, he keeps 
his forces organized to cripple progress, 
defeat justice, curse the people, overthrow 
law and dethrone God. He can possess 
men or enter into beasts, and crazes or 
destroys his victim (Matt. 8:28-32). 
Having existed through all time and 
knowing the weakness of humanity, he 
is not shut up to the ways of men. But 
he is confused and humiliated and de- 
feated and mortally wounded by the Lord 
Jesus Christ, the first man whose suprem- 
acy he was compelled to acknowledge, 
and he is in the last stage of his power. 
The originator of sin, the Devil is also 
the creator of hell. The Bible speaks 
TT „ _ . . , after the manner of men 

Hell as Spiritual , , . , . ~ 

_. T , because of the infirmity 

Doom Imaged q£ ^ & 

by Physical Suf- A , .it i 

ferin so Lord repre- 

sents hell as "the eternal 
fire which is prepared for the devil and 
his angels" (Matt. 25:41). Both the 
Devil and his angels and wicked men in 
the eternal world are spiritual, and literal 
fire would have no effect on them at all. 
But the Bible lays hold of burning, which 
causes the most intense physical pain, to 
picture the doom of the lost. Even in 
this life, distress of mind, or vexation of 

98 



SIN 

spirit, or remorse of conscience, or an- 
guish of soul, is worse than bodily suffer- 
ing. And the lost soul, having chosen 
wrong till it can choose nothing else, hav- 
ing sinned till it has no power to repent, 
the outlaw of all creation, a renegade 
and an interloper wherever it wanders 
through waterless places seeking rest and 
finding it not (Matt. 12:43), without 
sustenance or protection or sympathy, 
shall carry its punishment in the darkness 
and blindness of its own existence, in its 
outrage of the law of being, in its mem- 
ory of wasted opportunities, in the ever- 
lasting failure and in the eternal misery 
of its own life. If heaven is a place, it is 
too weak and dead from paralysis of 
good impulses ever to climb up to it; and 
wherever it is, wherever it can be, will be 
hell, into which it will gravitate deeper 
and deeper forever. 

Sin is leprosy of the soul, the uni- 
versal disease (Rom. 3:23). When this 
_ .. „ loathsome disorder devel- 

The Specific Cure j • 1 lt . 

f r the °P m neaven t " e in " 

Di f „. fected angels were cast 

down to the earth with 

their chief, the Devil, and their presence 

brought woe to the whole world (Rev. 

12: 7-12). The race was contaminated in 

09 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

its infancy, and the atmosphere of life 
was filled with the miasma of this awful 
disease. There is no hope for the victim 
till he becomes conscious of his malady, 
and then he must go to the great Physi- 
cian for treatment. No man can say, "I 
have made my heart clean, I am pure 
from my sin" (Prov. 20: 9). The treat- 
ment for sin is a matter of revelation 
from God. Animals were slain and of- 
fered by divine command until Jesus came 
and laid down His own life that the sin- 
ner might be healed and live (John 10: 
18). But even with this absolute remedy, 
this perfect specific, for guilt, none can 
be cured unless they take the medicine. 
And the kind of medicine to take, which 
must be such as to counteract the poison 
of the infection, is determined by the 
nature of the disease. Man contracted 
sin by hearing and believing and obeying 
a lie, preached by the Devil (Gen. 3: 1-8), 
the father of lies (John 8: 44), himself a 
living lie; and the only hope for the sin- 
ner is to undo this monumental mistake 
and expel this virus out of his soul by 
hearing and believing and obeying the 
truth revealed in Jesus Christ, himself 
the living truth, proclaimed by His 
Apostles, written in His Testament and 

100 



SIN 

preached the world around by His mes- 
sengers. 

Sin, whose stronghold is the flesh and 
whose inspirer is Satan, is marked by cer- 
. . tain symptoms. At first 

Symptoms of the . . . JMr i . . « 

_. . „. the sinner, hypnotized by 

Disease of Sin ,, -. -i • ' i • J . 

the devil into complaisant 
indifference, is blind to the enormity of 
his crime. And he needs the judgment of 
Jehovah ringing in his ears (Gen. 4:9- 
15); or the plain speech of Samuel to 
bare his disobedience (1 Sam. 15: 10-31) ; 
or the horror of his selfishness pictured 
by the wisdom of Nathan (2 Sam. 12: 1- 
15); or the sin-exposing, guilt-convicting, 
heart-pricking, conscience-searching ar- 
raignment of Peter (Acts 2: 14-42); or 
the arousing, terrifying logic of Paul 
(Acts 24: 24, 25) — to awake him out of 
his lethargy. The sinner, like vermin, 
loves darkness rather than light (John 
3: 19), because his deeds are evil. And 
when he is so utterly devoid of goodness 
or sense that his foolishness goes to the 
extreme of denying God (Ps. 14: 1), 
there is no hope for him unless it be the 
plea of idiocy. And when the sinner is 
stirred up he does one of two things: he 
either surrenders to the Lord Jesus Christ 
and enlists in the great army of right- 

101 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

eousness, or, deciding to continue to gang 
with the Devil's crowd, he rages, medi- 
tates a vain thing, sets himself with kings 
and takes counsel with rulers against 
Jehovah and against His Anointed, to 
break their bands asunder and cast their 
cords away from him (Ps. 2: 1-6). 

Sin never rises above its source. It 
has the perversity of the Devil, who, de- 

„. ., ., ceiving the weak, perse- 
Sin Always Man- , . - & , , . ' * , 
, j A t. cuting the innocent and 

acled to the i j • ^ j i- 

_ .. TA _ slandering the good, lies 

Devil, Its Be- jimi-li.i1 • 

etter a kills; the hypocrisy 

of Satan, who, setting up 
synagogues and building churches in pa- 
tronage of false professors, prostitutes 
religion to his own degeneracy; and the 
arrogance of the old red dragon, who, 
rebelling against God, presumed to war 
against Michael and his angels, and, 
though humiliated by defeat and cast 
down to the earth, even dared to tempt 
the Lord Himself. And it cannot break 
the manacles of its diabolical origin ex- 
cept by its own destruction. But though 
all the devils and sinners of earth and 
hell combine against Jehovah, He will 
laugh and hold them in derision; and, 
speaking to them in His wrath and vex- 
ing them in His sore displeasure, He will 
102 



SIN 

set His king upon the holy hill of Zion. 
Holiness is better than wickedness, good- 
ness is superior to evil, God is stronger 
than the Devil, and the cause of the Lord 
cannot but prevail. 

Gluttonous of appetite, riotous of pas- 
sion, profligate of lust, short of vision, 
*ru ™ i. t* weak of constitution and 

The Flesh En- . , . , . r « , 

m± 11 j u o- vain of its brief, shadowy 
thralled by Sin v , ,, , i j • 

life, the human body is 

the most vulnerable to sin. And here the 
Devil, finding three points of weakness — 
"the lust of the flesh and the lust of the. 
eyes and the vainglory of life'' (John 2: 
16) — attacks them with all the cunning 
craftiness of his petty sophistry, with all 
the lying words of his blasphemous 
slander, with all the treachery of his 
awful depravity, with all the vehemence 
of his insane fury. Thus Adam and Eve 
and all their descendants, save One, have 
gone down by this terrific onslaught 
(Gen. 3: 1-9; Matt. 4: 1-11; Heb. 2: 18; 
4: 15). The enthronement of sin in the 
flesh makes great conflict in the Chris- 
tian's life, of which Paul in the narrative 
of his own experience has given the best 
description ever written (Rom. 7:7-25). 
But, "delighting in the law of God after 
the inward man" and serving this law 

103 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

with the mind and heart and subjugating 
the body to the soul, the follower of Jesus 
is "not in the flesh, but in the Spirit" 
(Rom. 8:6-8). 

Jesus was attacked at the time of 
bodily hunger and exhaustion in every 
™- ^ , *u point of human weakness. 

The Only Abso- *1 , TT . , TT . 

. A „. A But He gripped His own 

lute Victory over , , « ? , rr « , « 

g . soul, held back the waves 

of sin, and drove the 
Devil away covered with the humiliation 
of his first absolute defeat in this world. 
The Devil intimated that if Jesus did not 
make the stones of the wilderness into 
bread, He would starve. But the Lord 
would not abuse His power to gratify His 
appetite, and the angels came and fed 
Him. He despised the applause of curi- 
ous, wicked men, such as might have been 
provoked by his jumping off the pinnacle 
of the temple; and He put aside worldly 
glory, for that He had before the world 
was. He knows, and has warned His 
disciples abundantly, that if sin is toler- 
ated in the flesh, unbridled, without re- 
straint, it will becloud the mind, corrupt 
the heart, poison the soul, blast the ex- 
istence, slay the life! The mind needs 
constant renewal (Rom. 12:2) and leis- 
ure to fasten itself on things above, where 

104 



SIN 

Christ sits at the right hand of God (Col. 
3: 1-3) ; the heart needs purity for vision 
(Matt. 5:8) to see the invisible (2 Cor. 
4: 16-18), and the life must have right- 
eousness and sanctification, without which 
none shall see the Lord (Heb. 12: 14). 

Little sins (if there are any) are like 
the tiny copperheads, or cotton-mouthed 
-. n .. n moccasins, that wiggled 

The Deadly Con- A . ' . , ^ r t? • 

flict f Sin Vei *y m & nt °* tneir 

birth through the meshes 
of the screen too small to admit the big 
snakes, and sank their fangs into the 
great boa-constrictor and slew him by 
their poison before the break of day. 
And sin is no respecter of persons. It 
attacks both the leader of the host (Num. 
20: 1-13) and the humble man of the 
camp (Josh. 7), and seizes both the cov- 
etous wretch (John 18: 1-5) and the 
overconfident disciple (John 18: 15-27), 
each distinguished by the ability of 
leadership, and the obscure hypocrite 
(Acts 5:1-11). 

Sin of whatever degree or kind, pos- 
itive or negative, is lawlessness (1 John 
3: 14). Though it is not imputed when 
there is no law (Rom. 5:13, 14), and 
though God overlooked the times of igno- 
rance (Acts 17:30, 31), sin slays its 

105 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

victim just the same (Rom. 2: 12). The 

function of law is to expose sin in its 

r , „. hideousness (Rom. 7: 12, 

Lawless, Sin n x A , \ , , 

Slays Its Victim 13 > A , nC * * ^l^ 
TT . 01 . crime of the ages — the 

Unless Slam 1 r - ° - 

murder of the perfect 
Man in the defiance of all 
law — has turned on sin the light of reason 
and love so that it is destined to die. But 
even when destroyed in its criminal as- 
pects it may linger in the form of neglect 
(Jas. 4: 17). A little boy in rags whose 
faith a cruel skeptic tried to destroy by 
saying, "If there is a God, He would tell 
somebody to buy you clothes," answered, 
as his tears flowed, "God does tell some- 
body, and somebody forgets." And that 
— oh, the pathos of it! — that is criminal 
in the sight of the Lord and the kind of 
sin for which many will be condemned 
on the judgment-day (Matt. 25:31-46). 

Review Questions 

77 (1) How is sin the blight of the 
world ? 

78 (2) What is the origin of sin? 

79 (3) How are heaven and hell de- 
fined by contrast? 

80 (4) How is the actuality of the 
Devil proved? 

106 



SIN 

81 (5) What are "the works of the 
Devil" ? 

82 (6) Why is hell as spiritual 
doom imaged by physical suffering? 

S3 (7) What is the specific cure for 
the disease of sin? 

84 (8) What are the symptoms of 
the disease of sin? 

85 (9) How is sin always manacled 
to the Devil, its begetter? 

86 (10) How is the flesh enthralled 
by sin? 

87 (11) Who achieved the only ab- 
solute victory over sin? 

88 (12) What shows that the conflict 
of sin is deadly? 

89 (13) What shows that sin is law- 
less and slays its victim unless slain 
itself? 



t07 



VII 

THE GOSPEL 

IT was inevitable that the love of God 
should devise a plan to protect man 
from the Devil and create an adequate 
T , n . n ,, remedy for sin that 

The Gospel Gods ,/ A . « c 

™ A - would save the soul from 

Plan to Destroy , . « . r A , 

death, purify the atmos- 

Sin and Save the , r * ■ i ,1 

. phere and make the en- 

vironment of life clean 
and perfect. But this could be done only 
as man understood in some degree the 
purpose of the Lord and co-operated with 
Him. Hence, years and centuries and 
millenniums of education and training 
were unavoidable. Sin has the germ of 
certain death in it. It sears the con- 
science, intoxicates the mind and inflates 
the heart. And only after repeated fail- 
ure in His own way has man been willing 
to walk in the way of Jehovah. Only the 
great Physician has the wisdom and the 
skill and the sympathy to diagnose the 
human heart and prescribe a remedy for 
sin. And He performs this delicate oper- 
ation with such consummate genius and 

108 



THE GOSPEL 



divine power that all are saved who fol- 
low the directions of His glorious gospel. 
The gospel is no new thing, no mod- 
ern conception. It has existed from all 
nn. ^ i ^ eternity (1 Pet. 1: 17- 

The Gospel Born God laid the foun- 

of Man's Original , '. r ,« , , -, 

* . dation of the world and 

Likeness to God , . , , 

did every subsequent 
thing with the gospel in view. It seems 
that evil began before the creation of 
man. And perhaps the purpose of Jeho- 
vah in bringing the earth into existence 
was to furnish a theater in which the 
problem of sin could be worked out and 
settled forever for the benefit of the 
whole universe. In any case, the Devil 
was cast down to the earth, as we have 
already seen. And the Lord, foreseeing 
that man would fall and go down forever 
without help, made man in His own image 
so that "in due time" He might make 
Himself in the image of man and save him 
from eternal death. God never could 
have become Jesus of Nazareth but for 
this original likeness and kinship, neither 
could any man ever have become like 
God. Jehovah created all things. But it 
is impossible that He should make Him- 
self the sun or the ocean or a mountain 
or a tree or a horse, because these things 

109 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

never had any similitude to Him. It is 
likewise impossible that man could have 
evolved from any lower animal. If man 
developed from a monkey or a tadpole, 
why do not the monkey or the tadpole 
unfold into something else now! The 
tadpole can become nothing but a frog. 
And the monkey is doomed always to be 
a monkey, though he is good company 
for the fellows who boast of their com- 
mon ancestry with him. Talk about the 
missing link between man and beasts! 
whole chains are missing! 

God unfolded the gospel gradually as 
the world could receive it. He intimated 
_^ . , the gospel in His sentence 

Development of ° jl r r 

- „ , upon the serpent for m- 

the Gospel v , . S , , - 

troducing sin into the 
world (Gen. 3: 15). And this intimation 
i hat the seed of the woman should bruise 
the serpent's head was the only light Adam 
and Eve had, as, with bowed heads and 
bent forms and crushed hearts and sinful 
lives, they went out of Eden into the 
darkness of death; but it was significant 
of God's eternal purpose, as permanent 
as the foundation of the universe, as 
fixed as the stars of heaven ! Later Jeho- 
vah preached the gospel to Abraham by 

the promise that all nations should be 
no 



THE GOSPEL 



blessed in him (Gal. 3:8), and Abraham 
saw the day of Christ and rejoiced and 
was glad (John 8: 56). When Jacob, in 
telling his sons what should befall them 
"in the latter days/' declared, "The scep- 
tre shall not depart from Judah, nor the 
ruler's staff from between his feet, until 
Shiloh come; and unto him shall the 
obedience of the peoples be," he uttered the 
first Messianic prophecy, because "Shiloh" 
refers to Christ (Gen. 49: 1-10). Moses 
also prophesied the gospel (Deut. 18: 15- 
18). And so did all the other prophets, 
too numerous to mention. John the Bap- 
tist made immediate preparation for the 
gospel by the message, "Repent ye, for 
the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 
3: 1, 2) ; and so did Jesus Himself (Matt. 
4: 17), likewise the twelve disciples 
(Matt. 10: 1-7), and the seventy also 
(Luke 10: 1-16). Finally Christ died for 
our sins according to the Scriptures, was 
buried and raised on the third day (1 
Cor. 15: 1-4). And on the following 
Pentecost Peter preached the gospel for 
the first time in its fullness and glory 
(Acts 2). And so there are five stages 
of the gospel; namely, intimation, prom- 
ise, prophecy, preparation and fact. 

The gospel is a story of real life and 

8 111 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 



the most interesting biography ever writ- 
ten. Jesus left no written record by His 
_. _ . ,_ own hand. He had no 

The Gospel the . ^ . ^ , ., 

time to write. But it was 
Txr i°, r > y ^ ! impossible that such a 

World s Greatest .. c r TT . « 1t , , 

life as His should not be 
recorded. For a good 
many years after His ascension, however, 
the wonderful things He did and taught 
were preserved orally in the memories of 
His disciples and by the preaching of the 
Apostles. But during the latter half of 
the first century the life of our Lord was 
written for all subsequent time. Natu- 
rally many wrote of Jesus (Luke 1 : 1-4). 
And the narratives by Matthew and 
Mark and Luke and John, the completest 
and best of all, in the blessed providence 
of God have come down to us, and shall 
ring through the years to the end of time. 
These records, in their selection of per- 
tinent material, it being impossible to 
write all that Jesus did and taught (John 
20:30, 31), in their plain, simple state- 
ment of fact, in the natural setting of 
their story, associating their hero con- 
stantly with real things and human life, 
in their unconscious modesty and re- 
straint of sentiment or feeling, and in 
their artistic beauty and superior excel- 

112 



THE GOSPEL 



lence, bear the marks of truth in their 
message and on their face. That Mat- 
thew, Mark, Luke and John, or any other 
men, in the darkness and narrowness 
and bigotry and wickedness of two thou- 
sand years ago, with little opportunity 
of human learning and limited outlook 
upon the world, could have imagined 
what they wrote, is a greater miracle than 
that Jesus really lived and actually did 
and said the things accredited to Him. 

Matthew wrote to the Jews, the bur- 
den of his Gospel being to identify the 
_. _ . Messiah of prophecy with 

The Gospel T - AT r r - J Tjr . 

. T ., Jesus of Nazareth. His 

Necessarily J + 

,, ., , narrative properly comes 

Many-sided ~ J - r r . ; , . . 

first, because the divine 
order was "to the Jews first." Mark 
wrote from the Roman standpoint. He 
pictured Jesus as the supreme man of 
action and the hero of the race. Luke, a 
Greek himself, pictured Jesus as the ideal 
man, and his story of the Lord's life is an 
appeal to Greek idealism. No doubt John 
knew what the others had accomplished. 
And he made his Gospel an interpretation 
of the life of the Lord ; he gave its spiritual 
meaning, which powerfully impresses the 
Christian mind. The synoptists (Mat- 
thew, Mark and Luke) set Jesus among 

113 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

men in the world of time; John floods His 
life with the light and glory of eternity: 
they all show both His divinity and His 
humanity. Each had an immediate pur- 
pose in writing, but they have neverthe- 
less met the permanent need of the race: 
the four types of mind — Jewish, Roman, 
Greek and Christian — include the whole 
world. And so we have a many-sided 
gospel, perfectly written and adapted to 
the condition of "every creature," to 
whom it is to be preached. 

The golden thread running through 

the Bible from the beginning till it be- 

G comes a great chain to 

.u e Tur-° S f ! bind the Devil, the gospel 

the Miracle of . - . . ' . fe , r 

M . . is the miracle of miracles. 

Broadly speaking, the 
gospel, as we have seen, is the life of 
Jesus Christ, which, in its chief events, as 
Matthew abundantly shows, was written 
in prophecy hundreds and thousands of 
years before His birth. But Paul reduces 
the gospel to a smaller compass by point- 
ing out that it consists essentially of three 
facts — the death, the burial and the 
resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15: 
1-4). It is not merely that Jesus died, 
but that He "died for our sins according 
to the scriptures." Enoch and Elijah 

114 



THE GOSPEL 



were translated, and Jesus did not have 
to die. But, knowing that His death 
would accomplish what was otherwise im- 
possible — namely, the redemption of men 
— He laid down His life that He might 
take it again (John 10: 17, 18). 

However, in the last analysis the gos- 
pel is one. fact — the resurrection of Jesus 
A _ _ Christ from the dead. He 

And Proves and , . , , TT . , 

was buried and His tomb 
' . was sealed, but on the 

Supernatural - . , . \ T 

third day He arose to 
immortality, according to the Scriptures 
and His own prophecy. But, still deeper 
than this, the gospel is the resurrection of 
the dead, of which Jesus Christ gave the 
first illustration and the proof. All previ- 
ous resurrections were only resuscitations 
of the natural life. On this great cardinal 
doctrine Paul hangs everything: if the 
dead do not live again, Christ was not 
raised, faith in Him is vain, the preaching 
and the witness of the Apostles is false, 
and the whole human race is doomed to 
obliteration. And it must of necessity 
modify the view of the gospel to discard 
any of the other miracles of the Bible, 
every one of which finds its true meaning 
in its relation to the most supernatural of 
all events — the glorious example of our 

115 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

Lord that the dead shall live again! For 
the gospel is the key with which faith 
unlocks the mystery of every wonder in 
the Word of God. 

Paradoxical as it seems, the gospel, 

like the Bible, to which it gives character, 

« ,, c . ,. . is at the same time the 

Both Simplicity . . , 

, ,,, T simplest and the most 

and Mystery In- r . . 

, . - mysterious truth ever set 

here in the . J r T - . 

~ . before man. If it were 

Gospel , . . t -i * 

not plain, it would be 
unavailable to the common mind as the 
remedy for sin. And if it did not 
rise above the power of man and tran- 
scend the natural world, it would be 
tossed aside as unsatisfactory, as a 
human invention. In its practical appli- 
cation, it has three facts to be believed — 
the death, the burial and the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ; three commands to be 
obeyed — to believe these facts (Mark 16: 
IS, 16), to repent of sin (Acts 3: 19) and 
to be baptized (Matt. 28: 19) ; and three 
promises to be enjoyed — remission of sins 
(Acts 2: 38), the gift of the Holy Spirit 
(Acts 2:38) and eternal life (John 11: 
25, 26). It measures "the love of Christ 
which passeth knowledge" (Eph. 3: 14- 
19), and gives "the peace of God, which 
passeth all understanding" (Phil. 4:7). 

116 



THE GOSPEL 



Paul reduced the gospel to its essence in 
these words: "And without controversy 
great is the mystery of godliness ; he who 
was manifested in the flesh, justified in the 
spirit, seen of angels, preached among the 
nations, believed on in the world, received 
up in glory" (1 Tim. 3: 16). 

The gospel was a great surprise to 
the Devil. He could not foresee it. He 
_. _ . _ thought he was forestall- 

The Inscrutabil- . . & r ^ . , - 

. , . „ . mg it forever. Evidently, 

ity of the Gospel ** . , . - J : 

_, - Satan inspired wicked 

.t roves its 

Divinit men, whose minds and 

hearts and lives he domi- 
nated, to murder Jesus, whom he could 
not lead into sin. And the Devil no doubt 
expected to keep Jesus in the unseen 
world, where all the dead were, so that 
no light could come from eternity to time. 
Thus unwittingly Satan furnished the 
opportunity for the Lord's greatest vic- 
tory, His triumph over death, which at 
once set His kingdom on the foundation 
of eternal truth. Neither were the 
prophets able to understand the gospel 
as the spirit of Christ foretold it through 
them, and even angels desired to look 
into it (1 Pet. 1: 10-12). And we shall 
never be able to comprehend the depths 
of its foundation or the widths of its 

117 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

extent or the heights of its reach till our 
corruptible puts on incorruption and our 
mortal puts on immortality and our death 
is swallowed up in victory (1 Cor. IS: 53, 
54). But this very impenetrable mystery 
evinces the divine origin of the gospel. 

The gospel "is the power of God unto 
salvation" (Rom. 1:16, 17). But the 
„ . „ gospel does not save by 

How the Gospel & r . *_ , ., . J 

_ magic or by arbitrariness. 

It is powerful to save the 
believing only. For the faithless there is, 
there can be, no salvation. And the gos- 
pel saves those that believe, because 
"therein is revealed a righteousness of 
God from faith unto faith." Only those 
who have in their very being the life and 
righteousness of God can be, like Him, 
free from sin and forever happy. And 
this salvation, far beyond the law of 
Moses to accomplish, is the glorious 
achievement of the faith of the gospel of 
Jesus Christ. 

Therefore, the theme of the preacher, 

whose very calling is to lead the people 

^ ~ , *, in the way of life, is for- 

The Gospel Al- i j. j t» ■ i 

. _ . ever selected. Paul, 

ways the Preach- . - •.1.1 1 • 1 j. 

er's Theme equipped with the highest 

education the Jewish 

nation could give, well versed in Greek 

118 



THE GOSPEL 



lore, acquainted by travel with the whole 
world and unequaled in scholarship by 
any of his contemporaries, preached noth- 
ing but the gospel (1 Cor. 2: 1-5). But 
this does not shut up the Lord's mes- 
senger to mere routine or sameness or 
tiresome repetition, for the gospel is vari- 
ous and multiform. Existing in some 
stage in every dispensation, it has the 
universality of the human race; running 
through the Bible and echoed in all other 
good books, it is the most beautiful con- 
ception in literature; striking every note 
in the heart of man, it has the liveliest 
human interest of any song ever sung; 
reaching from the beginning to the end 
of time, it is the broadest, most inclusive 
plan ever known; and originating in the 
mind of Jehovah, it is the most profound 
system that ever challenged the thought 
of a rational being. But the Jews stum- 
bled over the simplicity and the humility 
of its Founder; the Greeks, the worldly 
wise, call it foolishness, and the wicked 
do not like to hear it ( 1 Cor. 1 : 20-25 ) . 
However, it is the only message for the 
dying. O man of God, preach it if the 
people like it, preach it if they do not like 
it, preach it forever! Anathematized is 
the messenger, man or angel, who 

119 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

preaches anything else (Gal. 1: 6-9), and 
cursed is any one who dares to add to it 
or to take away from it (Rev. 22: 18, 
19). It is God's absolutely perfect plan 
of salvation. 

The gospel is good news. There is no 
better news for the sick than that there 
_. ~ , XT is a remedy for his dis- 

The Good News , K J 

f th G eaSe ' n 1S smltten 

with the loathsome, fatal 
malady — sin ; the gospel is the specific for 
sin that never fails to cure. But the 
saved are not satisfied with themselves, 
and the gospel rallies their highest and 
best powers and gives them eternity to 
become what they will. Death has 
reigned supreme over every past genera- 
tion, and it stares us in the face. But 
the gospel makes the dead equal with the 
living (1 Thess. 4:13-18). Death has 
torn our beloved from us, but the gospel 
has bound up our hearts in hope. I 
would give all I have and lay down my 
life for sister's fellowship, father's bene- 
diction, the touch of mother's hand, the 
music of her voice, the smile of her recog- 
nition, the communion of the redeemed 
and the glory of the Lord. The gospel 
says I shall have the desire of my heart 
Oh, blessed evangel ! speed on thy way to 

120 



THE GOSPEL 



save every creature, make the nations 
rejoice and fill the earth with His praise! 

Review Questions 

90 (1) How is the gospel God's 
plan to destroy sin and save the sinner? 

91 (2) How was the gospel born 
of man's, original likeness to God? 

92 (3) Through what five stages 
have we the development of the gospel? 

93 (4) Why is the story of the 
world's greatest life the gospel? 

94 (5) Why is the gospel neces- 
sarily many-sided? 

95 (6) Why is the gospel the 
miracle of miracles? 

96 (7) How does the gospel prove 
and key the supernatural? 

97 (8) How do both simplicity and 
mystery inhere in the gospel? 

98 (9) How does the inscrutability 
of the gospel prove its divinity? 

99 (10) How does the gospel save? 

100 (11) Why is the gospel always 
the preacher's theme? 

101 (12) How is the gospel good 
news? 



121 



VIII 

JESUS OF NAZARETH 

T^HIS is the most fundamental of all 

* themes, because everything resolves 

itself at last into personality. The Bible 

Why All Truth « abs ° lutel y inseparable 
„ . T from Him, who revealed 

Focuses in Jesus TT . M1 . - - ^ 

His will in both lesta- 
ments and worked out His eternal pur- 
pose in the New; pictured Himself in the 
preliminary dispensations, and came in 
person to make the last ultimate in its 
religion by fulfilling the law of Moses, 
destroying sin and creating His own gos- 
pel message; sent the Holy Spirit to guide 
the Apostles into all the truth that He 
might convict sinners and comfort saints 
through them, whom he had trained to 
be His witnesses; established His church 
and commissioned His disciples to evan- 
gelize the world; surpassed earth and 
stirred heaven by saving men from 
eternal ruin; and has gone away to pre- 
pare a place for all His believers. And 
thus Jesus has focused in Himself all 
truth. 

122 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 



Jesus was foreknown from eternity ( 1 
Pet. 1: 19, 20). Jacob's mysterious con- 
. testant (Gen. 32:22-31), 

Jehovah that appeared 
Jesus to Moses (Ex. 3), the 

Prince that met Joshua by Jericho (Josh. 
5: 13-15), the Man that looked like a son 
of the gods as He stood with Shadrach, 
Meshach and Abednego in the fiery fur- 
nace (Dan. 3:22-25) — could these have 
been He who became Jesus of Nazareth? 
In any case, He who "became flesh and 
dwelt among us" (John 1 : 14) was in 
the world prior to His incarnation (John 
1: 10). His eternal relation to God is 
that of the Word by which all things 
were made and in which all things consist 
(John 1:1-3; Col. 1:16, 17). Himself 
the Creator of this world, His Spirit 
brooded over it and planned its redemp- 
tion. He was the rock that slaked the 
thirst of the weary Hebrew pilgrims (1 
Cor. 10: 1-4). Through the prophets He 
foretold His own sufferings and glories 
(1 Pet. 1:10, 11). And, but for the 
blindness of sin, the world would have 
known Him when He came in the flesh 
(Acts 14: 17; Rom. 1 : 18-23). That His 
own people rejected Him broke His heart 
(John 1: 11). 

123 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

The world unconsciously prepared for 

the advent of Jesus. And this prepara- 

„ A .. . tion was both positive 

How Antiquity - J . rrV t 

„ . . and negative. Ihe Tews 

Converged in , + & J 

XT , , __. turned attention away 

Need of Him P . , , . J 

from idols to the one true 
and living God, and demonstrated the 
failure of any mere legal system to save 
from sin. The Greeks developed the 
language, the most beautiful of all 
tongues, in which His life and teaching 
could be preserved forever, and proved 
the inadequacy of mere human culture as 
a remedy for man's distress. The 
Romans, with their genius for govern- 
ment, welded the fragments of the world 
into one mighty power, thus securing 
peace, without which Jesus and His her- 
alds could not have gotten the attention 
of mankind; and at the same time, their 
nation falling into decay, they showed 
the hopelessness of human government. 
And all the nations of antiquity con- 
verged in the need of Jesus Christ. 

Certain great heathen philosophers — 
as, Confucius of China, Zoroaster of Per- 
sia and Socrates of Greece — had intui- 
tions of the coming of a great man who 
would be able to teach the truth. And at 
the birth of Jesus, though the Jewish rul- 

124 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 



ers were indifferent in their knowledge 

and troubled in their wickedness (Matt. 

_. _,. ,. 2: 1-12), there was a 

The Timeliness . , y 7 « 

widespread expectancy, so 
that wise men came from 
the East to worship Him. 
And so Jesus came in the fullness of time. 
If He had come sooner, His work would 
have been impossible; and if His coming 
had been delayed, despair would have 
gripped the stoutest hearts. No doubt, 
at the earliest possible moment, He thrust 
Himself by incarnation into the terrible 
current of human life rushing to the 
cataract of eternal death and everlasting 
darkness, to save the drowning and rescue 
the perishing and pilot the believing, peni- 
tent, obedient sinner to the shores of the 
heavenly Canaan. 

Jesus is the great interpreter of the 

Bible. Without Him both Testaments 

ah n-ui ^ j would be incoherent in 

All Bible Roads jt . , . , 

T a . tt- their parts, meaningless 

Lead to Him . , . r ' , 1 1 • , 1 

in their words and hidden 
in their message; for all lines of the Old 
Testament converge forward, and of the 
New, backward, in Him as the center. 
He is the focal point of time, which men 
began to count anew at His birth. In the 
Old Testament, whose authority He 

125 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

recognized while He lived in the flesh, He 
was an intimation, a promise, a prophecy, 
a type, a shadow and a hope ; while in the 
New Testament He relieved Himself of 
all obscurity, kept the promise, fulfilled 
the prophecy and became the Antitype 
typified, the Substance shadowed and the 
Realization hoped for. No man can 
understand any part of the Bible till he 
understands its relation to Jesus the 
Christ. And as Philip began from a cer- 
tain Scripture and preached Jesus to the 
eunuch (Acts 8: 34, 35), it is possible to 
preach Him from any Scripture, for all 
highways or roads or paths in the Bible 
lead straight to Him. 

There is a forward look in every 
book, if not in every chapter, of the Old 
tt T A ~ , Testament, whose rela- 

He Is the Correl- I , 

, _ tion to Jesus may be 

ative of the , . . r . J 

„ , _ . 4 designated as comma up 

Holy Scnptnres ^ ^ The 0M ^J 

ment said that He would come ; Matthew, 
Mark, Luke and John testify that He 
came, for they saw Him and heard Him 
and touched and loved Him (1 John 1: 
1-4) ; Acts of Apostles, with conversions 
under all circumstances of sinners of 
every degree or kind, the only book in 
the Bible in which are explained the par- 

126 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 



ticular steps out of the world into the 
church, or the process of conversion, 
shows how to come into Jesus to possess 
His life and rejoice in His hope; the 
Epistles, from Romans to Jude inclusive, 
with warning and protection against the 
Devil, reproof for the erring, exhortation 
for the indifferent, comfort for the 
sorrowing, relief for the distressed, in- 
spiration for the faithful and instruction 
for all, reveal the triumphant life in 
Jesus; and Revelation, though filled with 
mystery, lifts the vail of time that we 
may see the redeemed living with Him 
forever. Others have spoken the Word 
or preached the truth, Jesus is the Word 
and the truth. And He is the great Cor- 
relative of the Scriptures. 

Jesus is the supernatural man. He is 
not part human and part divine. But the 
„ T A , TT . two natures, originally 

He Is the Union - • i • j S i 

r ,* j * a* the same in kind, though 

of God and Man . r ., - -.-. ' . ? 

infinitely different in de- 
gree, were perfectly blended in Him, so 
that He is at the same time wholly human 
and absolutely divine. Running parallel 
from His conception to His ascension, 
His humanity is in His divinity, and vice 
versa. He purified human nature and 
elevated it to the plane of the divine. He 

9 127 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

was plain of person and courteous of 
manner and easy of approach, but when 
His body matched His Spirit, "his face 
did shine as the sun and his garments be- 
came white as the light" (Matt. 17: 1-8). 
Why should it be counted incredible that 
Jesus came into the world without a 
human father, seeing that the first man 
had neither father nor mother, but was 
the son of God by creation ? Jesus might 
have come without a human mother, but 
He would not have been of our race. 
And if any man had been his father, He 
would have fallen like all ordinary mor- 
tals. He came directly from God, and 
reinforced the weakness of human nature 
by the power of heaven. He is the be- 
ginning of a new creation. 

Jesus is the ideal man. His heart was 

particular enough to be fond of His 

T _ .. friends, local enough to 

jcsus is trie « tt* 1 < 

A love His people and 

r „ ,. country with rich devo- 

of Excellence ,. J , , . 

tion, and general enough 

to take in the whole world with passion- 
ate longing. He appeals to the most 
diverse in temperament, to the rich and 
to the poor, to the learned and to the 
illiterate, to the young and to the old, of 
all generations. And if any do not re- 

128 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 



spond to Him, it is because they do not 
know Him. All good qualities combine 
in Him. He is quiet and heroic, reserved 
and aggressive, tender and terrible, sen- 
sitive and strong. And He excelled both 
in thought and in action. Peter had the 
power of action to take the initiative in 
preaching the gospel both to the Jews 
and to the Gentiles, John had the power 
of thought to sound the depths of Christi- 
anity, and Paul was Peter and John in 
one. But Jesus laid the foundation and 
blazed the way, and the deep thoughts of 
God came to the surface in His inimitable 
stories, unapproachable parables and 
matchless words. Other men have had 
some of the qualities of leadership, and 
one — Paul the Apostle — seems to have 
had them all in limitation, but Jesus had 
them all in infinite degree. 

The world is Jesus' field, and time is 
His day. As He died on the cross one 

„. TT . ,. A hand pointed to the be- 
His Universality . v - , f - 

ginning and the other to 

the end, and He made atonement for the 
sin of the world — His predecessors, con- 
temporaries and successors. By the light 
of promise, the hope of prophecy, the 
instruction of type and figure, the incar- 
nation of Himself and the presence of 

129 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

His Spirit in the Bible and in the lives 
of men, He has made Himself contem- 
porary with every generation from the 
beginning to the end of time. Hence, He 
is prior to every other man. And the 
Bible is particular to mention this priority 
over the greatest of the human race: 
Adam the first man (1 Cor. 15:47), 
Abraham the father of the faithful (John 
8: 58), Jacob who dug the well of Sa- 
maria (John 4: 1-12), David the great 
king (Acts 2:22-36), Solomon the wise 
man (Luke 11:31), Jonah the great 
preacher (Luke 11 : 32), John the peer of 
all (John 1:15; Matt. 11:7-11), the 
scribes who sat in Moses' seat (Matt. 7: 
28, 29). Yea, Jesus is superior to angels 
and to devils (Phil. 2: 5-11). 

But His very perfection made him 
lonely in this old, broken world. Even 

™. *w of w« His mother and His 

The rate of His , ., * TT . j. 

„ , . brethren and His dis- 

Perfection . « TT . , . ,. 

ciples, His most intimate 
associates, failed to understand Him. 
And what a sad lot fell to Him as the 
representative of sinners! Poor Jesus! 
Rejected of His own nation, persecuted 
by His enemies, betrayed, denied, desert- 
ed, by His disciples, sentenced without 
evidence or guilt, condemned in outrage 

130 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 



of common humanity, helpless in the 
hands of the depraved, forsaken of God, 
torn of body, broken of heart, He died on 
Calvary. Oh ! it is a sight to make angels 
weep and men wail. No wonder nature 
hid the scene in darkness! It was the 
very perfection of Jesus that drew upon 
Him the fierce hatred of the Devil and the 
bitter enmity of the world. And every 
man who attains in any degree unto His 
perfection must suffer in conflict with evil 
in his own heart and at the hands of the 
perverted. 

The Servant of servants, Jesus has 
become King of kings and Lord of lords. 
His Passion Was Jhree great callings, now 
s highly specialized and 

subdivided, combined in 
Him — preaching and teaching and heal- 
ing. Surely His was the most strenuous 
life ever lived. None could attract the 
people or make the truth luminous or heal 
the sick as He did. And yet He was a 
humble Plodder. He often addressed 
small audiences. And He "went about 
doing good." Though He healed miracu- 
lously, He was always conscious of the 
power that went forth from Him (Luke 
8: 43-48), and it must have drawn heavily 
on His strength and energy to make the 

131 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

sick well or the maimed whole or the dead 
alive. But He preached and taught and 
healed that He might serve. He dis- 
covered and proved that, while the road 
to greatness and glory and happiness is 
closed to kings and lords, it opens to the 
servant. And the secret of His place on 
earth and in heaven is the magnitude of 
His service. 

He did not ask to be coddled or fon- 
dled or entertained or ministered unto. 
a j r* j I, j All He wanted was the 

And God Made , , « - 

„. T , , chance to bless others — 

Him Lord and ,, • r^ t r 

Ch . to save them ! I herefore, 

God made Him both 
Lord and Christ. I once heard a critic 
say that, while Jesus is a historical char- 
acter about which we know a little, Christ 
is the creation of Paul, who idealized 
Jesus. Immediately it occurred to me 
that Peter confessed Jesus to be the 
Christ (Matt. 16: 13-20) and made this 
identity the climax of his Pentecostal 
sermon (Acts 2: 1-36), and Thomas called 
Jesus Lord and God (John 20:26-28), 
before Paul was converted. But the 
destructive critic has a habit of ignoring 
what the Bible says, without whose revela- 
tion Jesus Christ is a mere figment, with 
no power to work miracles or to forgive 

132 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 



sin and no existence antecedent to birth 
or subsequent to death. All the Bible says 
of Him is true or nothing is. 

But Jesus Christ is pre-eminently our 
Saviour. He came to seek and to save 
- , ' . T „. the lost. And all His 

Salvation Is His , . , t . 

Essential work preaching and teaching 
and healing are tributary 
to His mighty work as the Redeemer. 
While the New Testament faithfully re- 
ports His parables and discourses, it 
never loses sight of His fundamental pur- 
pose to save sinners. His death is given 
large prominence by all the sacred writers 
because it made salvation possible to all 
that accept Him. That is the reason why 
Paul determined to know nothing but 
"Jesus Christ and him crucified ,, (1 Cor. 
2:2). His coming into the world is proof 
positive of the reality of sin, and sinners 
are never willing to acknowledge Him till 
they are ready to give up sin. His mis- 
sion is the most serious and the most 
urgent in all time. If His advent were a 
pleasure trip, He had better gone to 
another world. If something had not 
been desperately the matter with men, He 
never would have come here. It is not 
that the alien sinner is going to be lost on 
the judgment-day; he is lost now, and 

133 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

there is no hope for Him but Jesus Christ, 
the only Saviour. 

Jesus Christ is forever identified with 

the human race (Heb. 13:8). He was 

T _ the same to His disciples 

Jesus Is Forever Cl TT r r . 

^ o r ,/r after He arose from the 
the Son of Man , - - J TT * , , 

dead that He had been 

before, with the salvation of men still on 

His heart. Stephen, the first Christian 

martyr, as his spirit departed, saw Jesus 

at the right hand of God and called Him 

the Son of man (Acts 7: 54-60), His own 

favorite appellation of Himself. To Saul 

of Tarsus Jesus identified Himself with 

His persecuted followers (Acts 9: 1-9), 

and to John on Patmos, after fifty years' 

separation, He appeared as "the faithful 

witness, the firstborn of the dead, and 

the ruler of the kings of the earth" (Rev. 

1:5). Heaven is His capital, but earth 

is included in His domain. 

Jesus, the name His mother gave Him 

by the advice of the angel, means Saviour; 

«7i. , tt ,»r a ^d Christ, His title, 

What He Was Jf A ' . . , A j 

.,.„..„ T means the Anointed. And 

and What He Is TT T ,-,, . . <. 

He is Jesus Christ for- 
ever. Anointed, not by holy oil, but by 
the Holy Spirit, He shall be our Prophet 
and Priest and King till all things have 
been put under His feet. Once He was 

134 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 



humiliated, but now He is glorified. Once 
He was limited by time and space, but 
now He is omniscient, omnipotent and 
omnipresent. Once He was the Babe in 
the manger, the Boy in the temple, the 
Youth in Nazareth, the Young Prophet 
of Galilee, but now He is our "Advocate 
with the Father" (1 John 2: 1), our High 
Priest in heaven (Heb. 4: 17-20) and our 
ever-living Saviour and Intercessor (Heb. 
7: 25). And some glad day He will come 
back to earth as He went away (Acts 1 : 
6-11), to take His believers to the place 
He has gone to prepare for them (John 
14: 1-3). He is the First and the Last, 
the Bright and Morning Star, the Fairest 
of earth or heaven, the only One alto- 
gether lovely! 

Review Questions 

102 ( 1 ) Why does all truth focus in 
Jesus? 

103 (2) How is the priority of 
Jesus explained? 

104 (3) How did antiquity converge 
in need of Him? 

105 (4) How is the timeliness of 
His incarnation shown? 

106 (5) How do all Bible roads lead 
to Him? 

135 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

107 (6) How is He the correlative 
of the Holy Scriptures? 

108 (7) How is He the union of 
God and man? 

109 (8) How is Jesus the acme of 
excellence? 

110 (9) How is His universality ex- 
plained ? 

111 (10) What was the fate of His 
perfection in this world ? 

112 (11) What did His passion to 
serve achieve or discover? 

113 (12) Why and how do we know 
that God made Him Lord and Christ? 

114 (13) Why was salvation His es- 
sential work? 

115 (14) What indicates that Jesus 
is forever the Son of man? 

116 (15) What was He and what is 
He? 



136 



IX 

THE HOLY SPIRIT 

SPIRIT is variously defined and difficult 
to comprehend. It seems well-nigh 
impossible for the human heart to con- 

_ .. t . ceive of a being without 
The Spirit and « j. , ^ , 

rf. « j embodiment, though we 

the Body . ,, & , 

are conscious that we 
ourselves are essentially spiritual. In 
this world man lives in a body whose 
component parts are of the earth, from 
which it draws its sustenance, and of the 
air, without whose oxygen it will die in 
three to five minutes; but his body is not 
he. Man's body is only his instrument of 
operation and communication in this vis- 
ible, tangible realm. However, though 
the flesh is subject to constant change in 
life and to disintegration in death, it is 
real, and to deny its existence is nothing 
but insanity. Moreover, so far as the 
domain of time is concerned, the physical 
is the basis of the spiritual. In order to at- 
tain to high spiritual life, we must respect 
our bodies as the temples of the Holy 
Spirit (1 Cor. 3: 16, 17; 6: 19, 20), keep- 

137 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

ing them clean and healthy as living sac- 
rifices, holy, acceptable to God, in spirit- 
ual service (Rom. 12: 1, 2). 

God has always reached man through 
his senses. He appeared and spoke to the 

TTTi. xt ~ patriarchs and to the 

Why No Com- ^ , , a j tt 

. ... prophets. AndHe 

mission to r 1 j ,1 v r TT- 

« . .. „ i reached the climax of His 

Preach the Holy . . . T -,. . , 

s . . revelation in Jesus Christ, 

who was seen by the eye, 
and heard by the ear, and touched by the 
hand, of men (1 John 1 : 1-4). Education 
goes on through the objective mind, and 
normally the subjective mind is below the 
threshold of consciousness. I answer 
criticism for not preaching the Holy 
Spirit by calling attention to the fact that 
He does not preach Himself. His mis- 
sion in this world is to glorify the Lord 
Jesus Christ (John 16: 13-15), whose 
teaching He declares unto us. It would 
cause endless confusion and open the way 
for all kinds of vagaries to preach a mere 
spirit. And the world cannot receive the 
Holy Spirit (John 14: 16, 17). But even 
sinners can understand Jesus; and His 
doctrine captivates their minds, His 
pathos melts their hearts and His motives 
stir their wills to accept His redemption. 
No man is commissioned to preach the 

138 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



Holy Spirit. But every sermon should 
begin and end and have its being in Jesus 
of Nazareth, who is God adapted to man's 
ability to understand. 

The Holy Spirit uses apprehensible 
means in affecting saints or sinners. Con- 
mt- rr, « • • sequent upon the ascen- 

The Holy Spirit . H r ,-f T j / T t. 

sion of the Lord (John 

™ n teS M 16:7 )> the Hol y s P irit 

Through the New J \ i - , J * , 

T came into the hearts of 

the Apostles to aid their 
memories, that they might not forget 
what Jesus had taught them, and to lead 
them into the knowledge of all the truth 
(John 14: 26) ; and the Holy Spirit influ- 
ences the world and the church through 
them. The New Testament was written 
by the Holy Spirit through consecrated 
witnesses of Jesus, and it is His instru- 
ment both to save sinners and to develop 
Christians. There is only one Holy Spirit 
(Eph. 4:4, 5), and He does not stultify 
Himself by modern statements contradic- 
tory of His eternal message in the Bible. 
And no man knows His truth unless he 
hears it or reads it out of the Word of 
God. 

The New Testament is the original 
message of the Holy Spirit. The prin- 
ciples of life as taught and illustrated by 

139 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 



Jesus Christ were too important to leave 
merely in the hands of men, however good 
«ru- u tt tt- an d capable the men 

Which He Him- . , , r A - , „ i 

,. T . , might be. And the Holy 

self Inspired c 9 . ~ n . . J 

bpirit, filling the men 

who wrote the New Testament (Acts 4: 
8), speaks in them with responsibility for 
what they say (Matt. 10: 19, 20), having 
taught them the very words to use ( 1 Cor. 
2: 13). If the Old Testament was given 
by inspiration of God (2 Tim. 3 : 16), how 
much more the New! This wonderful ef- 
fect — the equipment to write the Word of 
the Lord for the guidance of all subsequent 
generations — is described as the baptism 
of the Holy Spirit. And this indicates 
His absolute control. But the Holy 
Spirit does not have that effect on every- 
body who receives Him. Those who obey 
His message through the Apostles have 
Him as their abiding guest (Acts 2: 38). 
But nothing new has ever been added to 
His authoritative communication through 
the chosen witnesses of the Lord. The 
New Testament, like nature, is complete, 
though it is not all discovered or appre- 
ciated yet. No doubt the Holy Spirit can 
use books and men, but only as they are 
in harmony with the Word of God. In- 
deed, any teaching contrary to the spirit 

140 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



of the New Testament is of the Devil. 

And so the Holy Spirit is in the Word. 

Jesus said, "It is the Spirit that giveth 

_,_ „ , - . . life: the flesh profiteth 

The Holy Spirit ./. ,, F , ,. . 

r if -vi • .1. nothing - : the words that 

Intelligible in the T , fe , 

1 have spoken unto you 
are spirit, and are life" 
(John 6:63). Beyond question the ulti- 
mate reality is spirit, but as yet we do not 
know what spirit is. As ether, a fine sub- 
stance that evades analysis or baffles in- 
vestigation, fills all space, serving as a 
medium for light and electrical waves, we 
wonder whether the soul as a still finer 
substance permeates the body. Modern 
scientific investigators have discovered, 
by placing dying persons on delicately 
balanced platform scales, a very percepti- 
ble diminution in weight at the moment 
of death; and others claim to have photo- 
graphed with extremely sensitive plates 
and films radio-active emanations from 
the living and the souls of the dying or 
the dead. It has also been discovered 
that the organs and tissues of the body 
are alive after death, and would live in 
another body if transferred so that the 
blood would circulate. And so what 
causes the death of the body is the spirit's 
leaving it (Jas. 2: 26). But, whether the 

141 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

soul shall ever be apprehended by the 

senses or not, we know that it is. And 

we also know that, as the spirit of a man 

is manifested by what he says, the Holy 

Spirit makes Himself intelligible in the 

Word of God. 

The Word is the seed of the kingdom 

(Luke 8: 1-11). And the only way to 

_. . . account for the variety 

Disloyalty to the «. , ,, -\ 

_ . . , * of plants in the vineyard 

Spirit's Message r *_, T , . , , , J 
- . of the Lord is that men 

Causes Apostasy , 1 • i ,i • 

have proclaimed their 
own opinions and notions and prejudices 
as tests of fellowship, instead of preach- 
ing the Word of God in its purity and 
simplicity. Paul, in his exhortation to 
preach the Word, prophesied this deplor- 
able condition of apostasy (2 Tim. 4: 1- 
4). Prayerful study and faithful prac- 
tice of the New Testament never fail to 
produce the spiritual life, which it is idle 
for any to claim to possess who ignore or 
contradict the Word of God. 

The Holy Spirit is identified with the 
Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is 
om_ tt, «... not a mere influence. He 

The Holy Spirit . - ,« «... 

D ,-./'. , is one of the personalities 

Related to Christ £ . ,— . ./ Tr ,, 

™. • . ,* j of the Trinity. If there 

as Christ to God jt -. J . , . 

are three divine beings, 
there is only one God. And the relation 

142 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



of the Holy Spirit to Jesus is comparable 
to that of Jesus to God. Jesus came to 
reveal God (John 1 : 18) and to do His 
will (John 4: 35; 5: 30) ; the Holy Spirit 
came to glorify Jesus and to declare His 
riches (John 16: 13-15). Jesus as the 
Word was God (John 1:1); and both God 
and Jesus abide as the Holy Spirit in the 
man that loves the Lord and keeps His 
Word (John 14: 16-24). Whoever saw 
Jesus saw the Father (John 14:9); and 
every one that receives the Holy Spirit re- 
ceives Jesus. By identifying Himself with 
the Holy Spirit, Jesus fulfills His promise 
to be with His disciples "always, even unto 
the end of the world" (Matt. 28:20). 
He comforted His disciples during His 
bodily presence with them, and He as- 
sured them that, though the world could 
not behold Him after His departure, they 
should have "another Comforter." And 
He said in the very same paragraph an- 
nouncing this promise of the Holy Spirit, 
"I will not leave you desolate : / will come 
unto you" (John 14: 16-18). Moreover, 
since there are evil spirits that speak 
through false prophets (1 John 4: 1-3), 
the Spirit of God is known by His 
confession that Jesus Christ is come in 
the flesh. And no man can call Jesus Lord 

10 143 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

"but in the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:3). 
Both he that curses Jesus and he that 
denies His deity have the spirit of the 
Devil. 

The Holy Spirit is the Judge of the 
world. Jesus said of Him : "And he, when 
- „. e .. he is come, will convict 

The Holy Spirit ,, ,. '. ± 

t a .u txt u the world in respect of 

Judges the World . 1 <- • 1 , 

i. ^ xxr j * sin. and of righteousness, 

by the Word of i <• • i , r • 

T and of judgment: of sin, 

because they believe not 
on me; of righteousness, because I go to 
the Father, and ye behold me no more; 
of judgment, because the prince of this 
world hath been judged" (John 16:8- 
11). And this function of the Holy 
Spirit is performed through the word of 
Jesus, by which every delinquent hearer 
shall be judged in the last day (John 12: 
47, 48). According to the judgment of 
the Holy Spirit, it is sinful not to believe 
on Jesus Christ, who attained the right- 
eousness of God among men, and exposed 
the prince of this world as the crafty de- 
ceiver of men, the arch-enemy of souls, 
the consummate liar and murderer, the 
old Devil himself! Though sinners can- 
not receive the Holy Spirit (John 14: 16, 
17), through the testimony of the sacred 
writers He preaches to them the gospel, 

144 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



which is the power of God unto salvation 
from sin (Rom. 1: 16, 17). 

And "the Spirit himself beareth wit- 
ness with [not to] our spirit, that we are 

_. _ . . the children of God" 
The Rational (Rom g . ^ ^ ^ 

Testimony of the / . . . ' , n i i 

« i o • .. ,_ testimony is not a fleshly 

Holy Spirit the , . J , < J 

- . . . sensation nor a psycholog- 

Foundation of . , . ^ J .,*>* 

„ ical mood nor an excited 

Hope . . . rj,i 

imagination, lhe agree- 
ment of our spirit with the Holy Spirit is 
the proof of our salvation. And both 
spirits, the Holy Spirit and our spirit, tes- 
tify rationally. In Acts of Apostles, pre- 
eminently the book of conversions, the 
Holy Spirit reveals by many repeti- 
tions that the conditions by which the 
sinner realizes his redemption are faith 
in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the liv- 
ing God, repentance of his sins, public 
confession of his belief in the Saviour, 
and baptism into the name of the Father 
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
And with the witness of our own spirit 
that we have complied with these require- 
ments there can be no question that we 
are saved from our past sins. And know- 
ing this, we cannot but rejoice; but our 
joy is the effect, rather than the evidence, 
of our salvation. While human feeling is 

145 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

valuable in itself and powerful in its in- 
fluence, it changes with the weather, fluc- 
tuates with the physical condition and 
oscillates with the mood, and is too eva- 
nescent or mercurial to support the hope 
of eternal life. Let us obey the gospel of 
Jesus Christ as the foundation of our 
trust, and rejoice in the Word of the 
Lord, which pulsates with the life of the 
Holy Spirit, has the constancy of God 
and shall survive when heaven and earth 
pass away (Matt. 24: 35). 

Every spirit must have a body in 

which to live and work in this world. 

-, « t T And the Holy Spirit is in 

The Church Is ,, , t. "it. ,.• 1 

, « ^ r . the church, the mystical 

the Body of the q{ ^.^ ^ j. 

^ Ho ly Spmt jg y $) Eyen t V h / Hdy 

Spirit must make Himself tangible to 
operate in the material realm. And He 
came supernaturally upon the Apostles on 
the day of Pentecost to make them the 
beginning of the new creation in Christ 
Jesus, and establish the church in them as 
His body through which He could prose- 
cute the work of the Lord till the end of 
time. As the first man physically had 
neither father nor mother, but came into 
being by the direct creative act of God, 
so the first Christians had no church to 

146 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



mother them, and began the reign of 
Christ on earth miraculously. But as all 
other human beings have come into the 
world naturally by birth since the crea- 
tion of Adam and Eve, so all the spiritual 
children of God since the day of Pente- 
cost have been begotten of the Holy 
Spirit through the Word of God (1 Pet. 
1 : 23), and have been born of the church, 
the elect lady (2 John 1) and the wife 
of the Lamb (Rev. 21:9). 

And so all who come into the church 
have been made partakers of the Holy 

_, e . . - . Spirit by enlightenment 
The Sin Against j , t. . ^ r ix. 

th Hi s * *t a taste of the 

heavenly gift and the 
good Word of God and the powers of the 
age to come (Heb. 6: 4-6). And if they 
turn back to the weak and beggarly ele- 
ments (Gal. 4:8, 9), and crucify Jesus 
again by putting Him to an open shame, 
treading Him underfoot, counting the 
blood of the covenant unholy and doing 
despite to the Holy Spirit, "there remain- 
eth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a cer- 
tain fearful expectation of judgment, and 
a fierceness of fire which shall devour 
the adversaries" (Heb. 10:26-31). The 
Holy Spirit cannot remain in the hearts 
and lives of those who sin against Him, 

147 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

and for those who keep Him out by per- 
sistent violation of the Word of God, 
there is, there can be, no hope. Though 
the church passed through the Dark Ages 
and has been disgraced by crime and torn 
by faction, it has had faithful members 
from the beginning, in which the Holy 
Spirit has never ceased to dwell. And 
through the church the Holy Spirit will 
conquer the world for Christ. 

The Holy Spirit comforts and helps 

and inspires every one who believes in 

Wh th hi ^ e -^ 0I *d Jesus Christ. 

c • -f t C x T y Although we read in the 

Spirit Is a New r\iA *r *. *. r i.i_ 

^ 4 _, Old 1 estament of the 

Testament Rev- . ., - -. - /r + - 

elatio opirit of God (Gen. 1: 

2) and of the Spirit of 
Jehovah (Num. 11:26-29) described as 
holy (Isa. 63: 10), the Holy Spirit as a 
personality of the Godhead is a New 
Testament revelation. He could not come 
into this world as the Comforter of God's 
people until Jesus had gone away (John 
16: 7). Previous to the life and death 
and resurrection of Christ, our salvation, 
which fills us with joy inexpressible and 
glorious, was mysterious to the most 
highly favored of men, through whom it 
was prophesied, and it was hidden even 
from the angels (1 Pet. 1 : 3-12). But it 

148 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



was revealed to these ancient messengers 
of the Lord that their prophecy would be 
effective in ministry after its fulfillment. 
The Spirit of God did the utmost for 
the patriarchs and the Jews, but the best 
_ . thine possible in their 

How to Receive r * i u 

^ r» c ^ ages °* ^e world was 

the Benefit of the t ° « jt . 1 , T 

H l S ir't show them the Mes- 

siah through the coming 
years and centuries and millenniums. 
But now sin is actually atoned for, the 
door of death is unlocked, our Brother is 
on the throne of the universe, and the 
Holy Spirit brings rich comfort and ade- 
quate help and divine inspiration to all 
that receive Him. And this He does 
through the New Testament which He 
has inspired as the authoritative state- 
ment, interpretation and exposition of 
the gospel to be preached to all the world. 
And He has created the church as His 
dwelling-place among men till the end of 
time. The Christian era is the dispen- 
sation of the grace of Christ and the 
love of God through the communion 
and fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The 
only way to possess the Holy Spirit and 
be possessed by Him is to come into the 
church where He lives, and the only way 
to hear Him is to listen to the Word of 

149 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

God, in which He speaks. He inspired 
men to write with divine authority when 
that was necessary, and He fortified the 
infant church by miraculous demonstra- 
tions. But now He intercedes for Chris- 
tians (Rom. 8: 26, 27), and inspires them 
to "live soberly and righteously and godly 
in this present world" (Tit. 2: 11-14). 

Review Questions 

117 (1) What is the distinction and 
the relation between the spirit and the 
body? 

118 (2) Why is there no commission 
to preach the Holy Spirit? 

119 (3) Why does the Holy Spirit 
operate through the New Testament? 

120 (4) How did He Himself in- 
spire the New Testament? 

121 (5) Does the Holy Spirit make 
Himself intelligible in the Word? 

122 (6) How does disloyalty to the 
Spirit's message cause apostasy? 

123 (7) What texts of Scripture 
show that the Holy Spirit is related to 
Christ as Christ is to God? 

124 (8) What texts indicate that 
the Holy Spirit judges the world by the 
Word of Jesus? 

125 (9) Why is the rational testi- 

150 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



mony of the Holy Spirit, and not human 
feeling, the foundation of hope? 

126 (10) Why is the church the body 
of the Holy Spirit? 

127 (11) What is the sin against the 
Holy Spirit? 

128 (12) Why is the Holy Spirit a 
New Testament revelation? 

129 (13) What is the only way to 
receive the benefit of the Holy Spirit? 



151 



THE APOSTLES 

THE life of Jesus, marking the close of 
the Jewish scheme and announcing 
the Christian era, would have fallen far 

The Necessity for f^^ ^ ^Tl "' 

Competent Wit- f dced > Xt had * 0t be f" 
. T forgotten on the earth, 

nesses of Jesus , J* £ . - , • , « <• i . .• 
but for the faithful testi- 
mony of competent witnesses. And the 
Lord, knowing this better than anybody 
else, chose certain men in the very begin- 
ning of His ministry that, after seeing 
what He did and hearing what He said, 
they might be qualified by the inspiration 
of the Holy Spirit to interpret His life 
and preach Him orally to their contem- 
poraries, and in their record of Him send 
His name and glory down through the 
years forever. And these men, originally 
called disciples of Jesus, were later desig- 
nated as Apostles of Jesus Christ, because 
they became His messengers to all the 
world. 

Even in His earthly ministry Jesus 
multiplied Himself through His disciples. 

152 



THE APOSTLES 



The preparation for His kingdom was so 

great that John the Baptizer could only 

begin it; and He threw 

„, C i re irmnary Himself into this task 

Work and Names . a1 t1 ^ ,« r 

f th A sympathy of 

His heart, with all the 
fervor of His soul, with all the zeal of 
His Spirit and with all the power of His 
life. He also sent His disciples to help 
in this great work. They went by twos 
into places which He Himself visited 
later. And they did the same kind of 
work He did, preaching the same mes- 
sage, healing the sick, raising the dead, 
cleansing the lepers and casting out de- 
mons (Matt. 4: 17; 10: 5-15; Luke 10: 1- 
20). In all, there were eighty-two of 
these disciples, or forty-one pairs. And 
the Twelve that became Apostles are 
mentioned by name in pairs as follows: 
"The first, Simon, who is called Peter, 
and Andrew his brother; James the son 
of Zebedee, and John his brother ; Philip, 
and Bartholomew ; Thomas, and Matthew 
the publican; James the son of Alphseus, 
and Thaddseus; Simon the Canansean, 
and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed 
him ,, (Matt. 10:2-4). No doubt the 
number twelve was adopted in reference 
to the twelve tribes, over whom the 

153 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

Apostles were to be judges (Luke 22: 
30), and to indicate, by preserving the 
tribal reference, that the church would be 
the new Israel. But this first commission 
forbade the disciples from going among 
the Gentiles or the Samaritans, and lim- 
ited them "to the lost sheep of the house 
of Israel" (Matt. 10: 5, 6). And it was 
preliminary to the Great Commission, 
"Go ye into all the world, and preach the 
gospel to the whole creation" (Mark 16: 
14-18), which was given originally to the 
twelve Apostles. 

The Apostles were well prepared for 

their work. They were all of the Jewish 

__ . „ , race, to whom the oracles 

Their General - A , , , , . , 

. of God had been intrust- 

ed since Abraham. It 
was likewise to their advantage that they 
were of humble origin. They had the 
chance to grow up naturally. They were 
neither made self-conscious by too much 
attention nor spoiled by flattery nor 
poisoned by selfishness nor intoxicated by 
power nor ruined by wealth. They had 
to work to live. Four of them were fish- 
ers, one was a tax-collector, and they 
were all from Galilee except Judas the 
traitor. And their utter lack of worldly 
power or commanding influence among 

154 



THE APOSTLES 



men attracts attention to the Lord, who 
called them (1 Cor. 1:26-30) and to 
God, who bore witness with them (Heb. 
2:1-4). 

Moreover, they were graduates of the 

university of Jesus. Honest in heart, 

-„_■.„ . , docile in mind and plastic 

Their Special . ,. P ^ ^, r 

: in life, they were the apt- 

est pupils the Lord could 
find. While the college of Jesus was de- 
void of externals, such as buildings and 
material equipment, it had in supreme 
degree the one essential thing of a school 
— the Teacher. Its sessions were in the 
valley, or on the mountain, or in transit 
across the lake of Galilee or through the 
provinces of the Holy Land. And its 
scholars were saved from pedantry or 
scholasticism both by the character of the 
instruction and by frequent touch with 
the outside world. The parables that the 
Teacher spoke to the multitudes He ex- 
plained to His disciples, and He pro- 
nounced His Apostles more blessed in the 
things they saw and heard than the 
prophets and righteous men who preceded 
them (Matt. 13: 1-23). 

The Apostles were strong and healthy 
from outdoor life. Jesus stimulated them 
by His realization of the ideal, and He 

155 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

drilled them both theoretically and prac- 
tically. And their education was rounded 
_, . „ , . and complete. They were 

Their Education t , , 1 ,, • J ,, 

, T . taught to do things — the 

and Inspiration A ° c . . & j . 

art of achievement, the 

union of prayer and deed. Exhorting 

them to pray for laborers, the Lord 

thrust them into His harvest, plenteous 

and ripe and wasting, in answer to their 

own prayer (Matt. 9:35-38; 10:1-15). 

The most powerful factor in education 

is the example and the personality of the 

teacher. And when the Apostles went 

out to teach and preach and heal, they 

must have unconsciously imitated their 

Teacher. But with all this preparation 

and training and education, the Apostles 

were unequal to the task imposed on 

them, the mightiest ever assigned to men ; 

and they had to tarry in the city till they 

were clothed with power from on high 

(Luke 24: 44-49). It was the inspiration 

of the Holy Spirit that enabled them to 

witness for Jesus "both in Jerusalem, and 

in all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the 

uttermost part of the earth" (Acts 1 : 8). 

The Apostles were the representatives 

of Jesus. From the beginning of their 

labor under the preliminary commission, 

though their understanding of Him was 

156 



THE APOSTLES 



imperfect, Jesus identified Himself with 
them, saying to them, "He that receiveth 
Tii.irT^imnnv y° n receiveth me" (Matt. 

Ineir lestimony "i A A ~. ^j. 

it _ „ . ^ 10: 40). Of course every 

the Foundation ~. . J i . , J - J 

f o f * h Christian is related to 
Christ, but the Apostles 
are His unique agents for all time. Com- 
panying with Him and with one another 
in all His ministry, even from the bap- 
tism of John unto the ascension of the 
Lord, and being thus thoroughly qualified 
to identify Jesus, they are the authorized 
witnesses of His resurrection from the 
dead (Acts 1 : 12-22). None who did not 
see Jesus in the flesh, or to whom He has 
not appeared since He arose, can witness 
for Him except in a secondary sense ; and 
the faith of all His disciples since the 
creation of the church on the day of Pen- 
tecost rests primarily on the testimony of 
the Apostles and their associates. Verily, 
the Apostles are the great branches 
through which the fruit of the vine is 
borne (John 15). 

But their marvelous strength was the 
Lord's, whose heroism stirred their souls 

The Secret of atl( ^ wnose Holy Spirit 

Th ir P w use( ^ tnem as tne instru- 

ments of His revelation. 
And the secret of their power was their 

157 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

direct connection with Jesus Christ. 
They worked miracles, but always in His 
name (Acts 3: 1-10). They could for- 
give sins (John 20: 19-23) or bind and 
loose on earth with recognition in heaven 
(Matt. 16: 18, 19; 18: 18), because they 
were commissioned as the ambassadors of 
Christ (2 Cor. 5: 20). And with perfect 
efficiency did they represent the Lord. 
They exposed His death as the greatest 
crime of the ages and drew to themselves 
the fury of His bitter enemies. And, like 
Him, they endured persecution, and, with 
one exception, suffered martyrdom. The 
naturalness of their story, which is uni- 
formly modest and absolutely free from 
affectation, the simplicity and inherent 
truthfulness of their testimony and the 
fortitude of their service have won mil- 
lions to the Lord, and shall ultimately con- 
quer the world in His name. 

The Apostles were Spirit-filled men. 
In no other way could they have accom- 
plished their extraordi- 

Completion of the r . . m, TT , 

«r ; * t . nary mission. The Holy 
Work of Jesus in .-V . - , < 

Them by the gnat in them protected 
„ , „ . , A the world against loss or 

Holy Spint , <■ •, 

counterfeit or misrepre- 
sentation by any treachery of their 
memories in reporting what Jesus had 

158 



THE APOSTLES 



said to them (John 14:26). And the 
Holy Spirit guided them into all the 
truth, which, of course, Jesus knew, but 
could not teach them because of their 
inability to understand (John 16: 12-15), 
but which the Holy Spirit could make 
plain to them by glorifying Jesus in 
heaven. Unto them was fulfilled the 
prophecy of John the Baptizer that Jesus 
should baptize in the Holy Spirit (Matt. 
3:11; John 1:35). Immediately after 
the selection of Matthias to take the place 
of Judas, it is written of the Apostles: 
"And when the day of Pentecost was 
now come, they were all together in one 
place. And suddenly there came from 
heaven a sound as of the rushing of a 
mighty wind, and it filled all the house 
where they were sitting. And there 
appeared unto them tongues parting 
asunder, like as of fire; and it sat upon 
each one of them. And they were all 
filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to 
speak with other tongues, as the Spirit 
gave them utterance" (Acts 2: 1-4). 

Now, this miraculous experience, 
properly described as the baptism of the 
Holy Spirit, has never been repeated in 
all the history of the church, save in the 
house of Cornelius to show that God 

11 159 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

makes no distinction between the Jews 
and the Gentiles (Acts 10), and in the 
«M. mu «r cas e of Paul to make him 

Why They Were A , , « ^ 

t> .• j r .u an Apostle also. Bap- 
Baptized of the . *\ - j.j^ 
„ . e . ., tism brings the candidate 
Holy Spirit i . i a ^in- 
completely under the in- 
fluence of the element; as, water, in 
which he is baptized. Thus the Apostles 
were dominated by the Holy Spirit that 
they might guide the church in doctrine 
forever, and by miraculous demonstra- 
tions protect it in its infancy from the 
strong enemies that sought to strangle it. 
They were enabled to speak in tongues 
on Pentecost that the gospel might be 
preached to the vast multitudes in Jeru- 
salem assembled from all nations and 
speaking all languages (Acts 2: 1-13). 
And in every miracle wrought through 
them there is a reason worthy of God 
(Heb. 2: 1-4). Their prayers were 
always answered, because they were filled 
with the Holy Spirit (Matt. 18: 19; John 
14: 13-16). 

There is no exception to the rule that 
like causes produce like effects. And if 
anybody nowadays should experience the 
baptism of the Holy Spirit, the effects on 
Pentecost, at the house of Cornelius and 
in the case of Paul would be observable. 

160 



THE APOSTLES 



Everybody that is obedient to Jesus Christ 
has the Spirit (1 John 3: 23, 24), but not 
"The Gift of the * n ^ degree in which the 
His* *t" Apostles had Him. And 
this is true because it is 
both unnecessary and impossible to re- 
peat their work. The effect of the Spirit 
on the ordinary representative of the 
Lord is appropriately represented as "the 
gift of the Holy Spirit'' (Acts 2:38). 
And there is no necessity now for the 
baptism of the Holy Spirit, such as the 
Apostles experienced, because the Holy 
Scriptures equip us for every good work 
(2 Tim. 3:16). 

Under God, the Apostles were the cre- 
ators of a great age. Jesus, His glorious 

The Apostles the "S ht breaking through 
„ ,,, the awful darkness, ush- 

Greatest Men , . , , « " - , 

in Hi tor e in dawn ; but 

not till after His resur- 
rection and ascension and coronation in 
heaven, and the descent of the Holy Spirit 
to inaugurate His reign on earth, could 
the day break forth in all its splendor. 
The Apostles were the most intimate 
friends of the Lord Jesus, the most 
powerful instruments of the Holy Spirit, 
the most highly favored of earth and the 
greatest men in the history of the world. 

161 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

And the time of their earthly pilgrimage 
could not but mark the most momentous 
period in the history of the church. Their 
peculiar work was prayer and the minis- 
try of the Word, from which they refused 
to turn aside (Acts 6: 1-6). And, by the 
exercise of their exclusive power to im- 
part the Holy Spirit to others by laying 
their hands upon them, they qualified 
their contemporaries to serve the church 
as occasion arose or necessity demanded 
(Acts 8: 14-24). 

And when some of these men who 

thus received the supernatural power of 

™. • tt -v. the Holy Spirit rivaled 

Their Humility, A , . , J - *\ 
„ ,. , their benefactors m mi- 
Equahtyand , , J .. 

p raculous demonstrations 

or in ability to preach 
the gospel, as Stephen (Acts 6: 8-15), or 
in talent and authority to write, as Luke 
and Mark, the Apostles were too big for 
jealousy. Yea, they were magnanimous 
enough to recognize the apostolate of 
Paul, to whom Jesus appeared as out of 
due time (1 Cor. 15: 1-11), calling him 
directly from heaven and making him 
the most fruitful of all the Apostles, so 
that he began to preach without any con- 
ference with them or with any other men 
(Gal. 1: 11-17), when finally they under- 

162 



THE APOSTLES 



stood that, as they ministered to the Jews, 
Paul's apostleship was special — to the 
Gentiles (Gal. 2: 1-10). Moreover, the 
Apostles, Paul included, were on an equal 
footing with one another. They affected 
superiority over none ; and, like their Lord 
and ours, they coveted only the privilege 
of service. Any apparent distinctions 
among them are due to difference in tem- 
perament or to inequality in intellectual 
equipment. But, as every generation must 
go to them for first-hand testimony of the 
life and death and resurrection of the 
Lord Jesus Christ and for the authorita- 
tive interpretation and application of His 
teaching, their power is contemporaneous 
with the Christian era. 

There is, there can be, absolutely no 

succession in the apostolic office. Paul 

«.»-,' possessed indomitable 

The Absolute ^ .,, J , , * 

„ x . _ . will, matchless heroism, 

Eternal Primacy \ , i * 

rAU „, , unabated enthusiasm, 

of the Twelve , . , ' 

Apostles marvelous judgment and 

far-seeing vision, has 
written a large portion of the New Testa- 
ment, and is second in powerful influence 
only to Jesus Himself. Yet those who 
were Apostles before him have a certain 
primacy over him by virtue of their per- 
sonal association with Jesus in His min- 

163 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

istry. Paul was called not to take the 
place of Judas — Matthias was selected 
in the traitor's place (Acts 1 : 15-26) — 
but he was an Apostle in his own right. 
Paul's office begins and ends in himself. 
Nobody can be an Apostle at all who has 
not seen Jesus since His resurrection. 
And I suppose that, if the Lord had a 
great original work yet to be done, like 
that which Paul did, he would appear to 
some good man and give him his creden- 
tials to be an Apostle. But such a one 
is not, and has not been since the day the 
Apostle to the Gentiles lost his life in 
wicked Rome. And, after the decease of 
all the disciples among whom Jesus went 
in and out, it was absolutely impossible 
for anybody to occupy the position of the 
original Twelve. 

It is counterfeit and impious and blas- 
phemous for the infirm priest on the 
™ a , Tiber, or any other 

The Apostolate Is , , . , 

_ „ . human being anywhere 

Fully Accom- - . . & J u - 

,. i. j • r,- e ^ se ' t0 c l aim to be the 

pushed m Them - -,-, , r 

successor of Peter or of 
any other Apostle. Death did not de- 
throne the Apostles. During all the 
Christian Dispensation, or while Jesus 
is in His glory, they are the judges of the 
church (Matt. 19: 28). Yea, death is but 

164 



THE APOSTLES 



the seal of their power, as it is of the 
Lord's. For to their writings the world 
must go to the end of time for the ampli- 
fication of the principles of Christianity. 
None are called to be Apostles now. But 
all that love the Lord and know the 
truth and have the ability are called to 
preach the gospel created by the Son of 
God, and recorded forever by His chosen 
witnesses. And every one who hears 
this gospel or reads it is called to be a 
Christian — the highest station ever occu- 
pied by mortal man. 

Review Questions 

130 (1) What was the necessity for 
competent witnesses of Jesus? 

131 (2) What was the preliminary 
work and what were the names of the 
Apostles? 

132 (3) What was their general 
preparation? 

133 (4) What was their special 
training? 

134 (5) What was their education 
and inspiration? 

135 (6) How is their testimony the 
foundation of our faith? 

136 (7) What was the secret of 
their power? 

165 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

137 (8) How did the Holy Spirit 
complete in them the work of Jesus? 

138 (9) Why were they baptized of 
the Holy Spirit? 

139 (10) Why does "the gift of the 
Holy Spirit" describe His effect on ordi- 
nary believers, but not on the Apostles? 

140 (11) Why are the Apostles the 
greatest men in history? 

141 (12) What shows their humility, 
equality and power? 

142 (13) What is the absolute eter- 
nal primacy of the twelve Apostles? 

143 (14) How is the apostolate fully 
accomplished in them? 



166 



XI 

THE GREAT COMMISSION 

ON account of its relation to all that 
preceded it, the personal ministry of 
Jesus was limited to the Jews. Only a 
«r L ^ »/r. . small portion of His own 

Why the Ministry , • j tt- 

c ; T . . z people received Him. 

of Jesus Limited \ < , -, . .«, 

And it was impossible 
for the Gentiles to under- 
stand Him, because they had neither the 
training of the law nor the inspiration of 
the prophets. But it was God's purpose 
from the beginning, who is no respecter 
of persons (Acts 10: 34), to extend sal- 
vation through Jesus Christ to all the 
nations and offer it to every human 
being (Gen. 18:18; Matt. 12:15-21; 
Luke 2:22-32; Rom. 4: 16-25). And a 
call from certain Greeks occasioned Jesus 
to foretell glory and fruitfulness through 
His death (John 12:20-36), which, 
breaking "down the middle wall of par- 
tition" (Eph. 2: 11-21), made it possible 
to preach the gospel to Jews and Gentiles 
alike and to unite them as "one man in 
Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3: 28). And at last, 

167 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

just before He ascended into His original, 
eternal glory, having accomplished His 
work in the world (John 17: 1-19), Jesus 
revealed His will to the Apostles and as- 
sured them that they would be able to 
execute it when the Holy Spirit came 
upon them. 

In the following words Jesus opened 
the Bible to all the world : "All authority 
_ _. ' _ , hath been given unto me 

The Five Records . a * * 

. . _ in heaven and on earth. 

of the Great ~, lt . , 

„ Go ye therefore, and 

Commission if • 1 r n ,1 

make disciples of all the 
nations, baptizing them into the name of 
the Father and of the Son and of the 
Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe 
all things whatsoever I commanded you: 
and lo, I am with you always, even unto 
the end of the world" (Matt. 28: 18-20). 
"Go ye into all the world, and preach the 
gospel to the whole creation. He that 
believeth and is baptized shall be saved; 
but he that disbelieveth shall be con- 
demned" (Mark 16: IS, 16). "Thus it 
was written that the Christ should suffer, 
and rise again from the dead on the third 
day; and that repentance and remission 
of sins should be preached in his name 
unto all nations, beginning from Jerusa- 
lem. Ye are witnesses of these things. 

168 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 

And behold, I send the promise of my 
Father upon you: but tarry ye in the 
city, until ye be clothed with power from 
on high" (Luke 24:46-49). "Peace be 
unto you: as the Father hath sent me, 
even so send I you. Receive ye the Holy 
Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive, they 
are forgiven unto them ; whose soever sins 
ye retain, they are retained" (John 20: 
21-23). "But ye shall receive power, 
when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: 
and ye shall be my witnesses both in Jeru- 
salem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, and 
unto the uttermost part of the earth" 
(Acts 1:8). 

And with the special significance of 

the last words of the Lord, the Great 

t ™ • j Commission is the most 

Its Magnitude . , « 

_ _ _ important document ever 

Demanded Repe- V . 1 • , 1 111 

,_ , written; and it should be 

tition and Taxed r .,. jt , « 

aii m as * ammar as tne alpha- 

, _ . bet to every Christian. It 

of Expression . . - . J l1 . T 

is evident that Jesus vir- 
tually repeated these words during the 
forty days between His resurrection and 
His ascension, when He appeared unto 
the disciples ten times, speaking the 
things concerning the kingdom of God 
(Acts 1:1-3). The very nature of the 
Lord's final charge to His disciples called 

169 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

for repetition and exhausted the forms of 
expression. According to Matthew and 
Mark, He gave the Great Commission at 
the appointed meeting in Galilee, which 
was His eighth appearance, when more 
than five hundred brethren were present 
(1 Cor. 15:6); according to John, at His 
fifth appearance on Sunday evening in 
Jerusalem; and according to Luke (in 
his Gospel narrative and in Acts of 
Apostles), at His ninth and tenth appear- 
ances, which were also in Jerusalem. 
Matthew and Mark state the Great Com- 
mission in the imperative, while Luke and 
John put it in the indicative. The Lord 
used both these modes of speech; and His 
witnesses are in substantial agreement, 
though they naturally differ in some of 
the details of their report. 

The Great Commission is the keynote 
of the Bible. Showing the temporary 
x. T xi_ «,. character of the Patri- 

It Is the Climax . , - T . - t^. 

, A , _. . „. archal and Jewish Dis- 

of the Divine Plan . 1,1 

r „ pensations and the per- 

for Humanity r r - . r r 

manence of the reign of 
Christ, it harmonizes all the apparent 
discords of the Word of God and entunes 
earth with heaven. It realizes the dream 
of the patriarchs and the hope of the 
prophets, and conserves the life of the 

170 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 

Nazarene, with its glorious divine revela- 
tion and vast human possibilities, for all 
subsequent generations. Placing the 
power and the wealth of God at the dis- 
posal of man, it is the invitation to the 
great feast of the Lord (Matt. 22: 1-14; 
Luke 14: 15-22), hinted in the doom of 
the Devil (Gen. 3: 14, IS), assured at the 
call of Abraham (Gen. 12:1-4; Heb. 
6: 13-20), foretold in ancient times (Gen. 
49:10; Deut. 18:15-18; Isa. 53), an- 
nounced by John the Baptist (Matt. 3: 
1-3) and set in order by the Lord Him- 
self (Phil. 2:5-11). 

However, the trustful who lived and 

died under the preliminary economies 

. , . partook of this banquet 

And Announces f , . , , T , r> rs\ 

the Rich Pro- by faith (John 8:56); 
, ~ , r and no guests could be 

vision of God for . 1 *> r , 1 

received till after the ex- 
altation of Jesus Christ 
in heaven and the establishment of the 
church on earth. But the divine factor of 
salvation was gloriously completed on the 
first Pentecost after the resurrection of 
Jesus, when the Great Commission was 
executed for the first time. And now 
everybody is called (Matt. 11:28-30; 
Rev. 22: 17). Every sinner who will pay 
the price of admission — purity of heart 

171 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

by faith in Jesus Christ and righteous- 
ness of life by repentance of sin and 
obedience to the gospel — may enter the 
house of God, satiate his hunger by the 
heavenly bread, quench his thirst by the 
water of life and rejoice in the hope of 
eternal happiness. If any perish from 
lack of food or drink, they do so against 
the will of God (2 Pet. 3: 9) and in spite 
of His rich provisions (Rom. 8:32). 

The Great Commission is founded on 
absolute authority. When Jesus arose 
„ from the dead He was 

Based on Love as , i j ■ 

. supreme on earth and in 

u on y, heaven, and He used His 

Proves Its Ongi- , ' - 

DV authority to save the 

world. Having fulfilled 
the law and the prophets and the Psalms, 
He supplanted the Old Testament with 
the New, and extended His liberty to all 
men. But power carries with it commen- 
surate responsibility, which has crushed 
many a man. Tyrannical rulers have used 
their authority to conquer and to kill, but 
Jesus used His to free and to save. Alex- 
ander and Caesar and Charlemagne and 
Napoleon sought universal domain by 
slaying their enemies; Jesus achieved it 
by allowing His enemies to slay Him. 
Their power, supported by force, had the 

172 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 

seeds of death in it and spent itself in 
destruction; His authority, based on love, 
is the very principle of life and grows in 
recognition with the enlightenment of 
men. Their kingdoms were of this world 
and were soon broken into fragments by 
the waves of time; His reaches unto 
heaven, defies disintegration and marches 
triumphantly through the centuries. No 
mere Galilean peasant with a handful of 
poor, obscure disciples could have medi- 
tated world-wide conquest, and no mortal 
man ever could have claimed "all author- 
ity on earth and in heaven." Jesus is — 
must be — what He claimed to be ; namely, 
the Son of God! And at the right hand 
of God, with the wealth of the universe 
available to His work, the good of earth, 
the redeemed of heaven and the angels 
subject to His command, He is Himself 
the guarantor of the success of His own 
enterprise to save the world. To this 
end, He educated the Twelve, called Paul, 
inspired them and Mark and Luke to 
write His Testament full and complete, 
abides by His Spirit in the church and 
co-operates with every faithful disciple. 

The Great Commission is the New 
Testament in essence. It promises salva- 
tion to all that believe and are baptized, 

173 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

and guarantees the presence of Christ 

with His disciples who preach the gospel 

t t t. xt to the whole creation and 

It Is the New A j • • 

repentance and remission 

Covenant Un- - r . . TT . 

A of sins in His name unto 

°* \ ^ . V all the nations. It also 

and the Epistles . . ,1,1 ,- 11 

enjoins that baptized be- 
lievers be taught to observe all things 
whatsoever Jesus commanded the apos- 
tles. The Lord covenanted originally with 
the Twelve, because they were qualified 
by association with Him and by the in- 
spiration of the Holy Spirit to interpret 
His Testament to the world; and the 
church was created in them. And their 
testimony, beginning in Jerusalem with 
mighty power because an accessible mul- 
titude was there (Acts 2), extended to all 
Judaea and Samaria, and through their 
record shall eventually reach the utter- 
most part of the earth. In His conver- 
sation with Nicodemus, Jesus compared 
the entrance into the kingdom of God to 
the very beginning of life, calling it a 
birth "of water and the Spirit" (John 3: 
1-15) ; and He indicated in the general 
terms of the Great Commission the con- 
ditions of redemption. But we learn from 
the Twelve and from Paul, in the book of 
their acts in executing the will of Christ, 

174 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 

that the primary essentials of the New 
Testament are faith in Jesus as the Son 
of God, repentance of sin, public confes- 
sion of Christ, and Christian baptism. 
And in the Epistles, special and general, 
we have both the truth that Jesus taught 
the Apostles, of which they were remind- 
ed by the Holy Spirit, and the truth into 
the knowledge of which the Holy Spirit 
guided them. 

Jesus left His work in the hands of 
His followers. "Come" is His invitation 
to the sinner, and "Go" 
is His command to the 
Christian. To accept His 
salvation is to assume re- 
sponsibility with Him for the lost. We 
are saved to serve (2 Cor. 5: 14; Phil. 1 : 
21-24). Some one has imagined that an 
angel asked Jesus, on His return to 
heaven, who would prosecute His work 
in the world, and that the Lord answered 
He had left His enterprise with His dis- 
ciples ; and when the angel suggested that 
His followers might neglect His charge, 
He replied that He had made no other 
arrangements. This trust and confidence 
is the highest honor the church has ever 
received from her Redeemer. Moreover, 
the Great Commission discovers the gen- 

12 175 



How the Great 

Commission 

Saves the Church 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

uineness of our profession and brings our 
salvation to perfection. One is not really 
a Christian if he is indifferent to the lost 
world. But to have fellowship with 
Christ in blessing others unconsciously 
develops our self-control and gives us 
the strength of the Lord. And though 
His kingdom has suffered much from 
mismanagement and indifference and 
criminality, Jesus, with His characteris- 
tic longsuffering and patience, has never 
divorced His affairs from men. So far 
as we know, He has spoken directly out 
of heaven to none since the days of the 
Apostles. 

When Saul of Tarsus was "yet breath- 
ing threatening and slaughter against the 
Tl T , - , disciples of the Lord" on 

It Is the Only , - , ~r\ i 

c . A . f A his way to Damascus, he 
Salvation for the , J . , . ,- ' , 

e . . „ was stricken to the earth 

Sinner and Hope , ,, -, ■, 

for the Christian by the sudden appearance 
and the startling voice of 
Jesus ; and he asked Jesus what he should 
do (Acts 9:1-19; 22:1-16). But the 
Lord said unto him, "Arise, and go into 
Damascus ; and there it shall be told thee 
of all things which are appointed for thee 
to do." And He sent Ananias, who com- 
manded Saul to arise and be baptized and 
wash away his sins, calling on the name 

176 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 

of the Lord. Even Paul had to submit 
to the terms of the Great Commission, 
the only way any sinner can become a 
Christian. And for any church or disci- 
ple of Christ to neglect the Lord's propa- 
ganda is base ingratitude. If we lose our 
first love, the Master will remove our 
candlestick (Rev. 2:4, 5). We owe all 
we are to the missionary effort of the 
past, and the only way to pay this debt 
is to preach Jesus to the lost. The con- 
gregation that does this shall be both 
the salt of the earth and the light of the 
world (Matt. 5: 13-16), and the Chris- 
tian that makes it the passion of his life 
shall flourish "like a tree planted by the 
streams of water" (Ps. 1: 1-3). 

The Great Commission is the work 
of the whole church. The Lord neces- 
_. -, ,. „ sarily created the mess- 

The Great Com- J . . , . , 

• • «r. i age, but he wisely pre- 

mission Wisely mi , i i r\ 

_, .. scribed no method. Once, 

Prescribes no , T i • • 

»* ^ j * r» when I was explaining 

Method of Pro- Jt . , . . r . & 

. this to an anti-missionary 

cedure . T - / 

congregation, I asked, 
"If Jesus were on earth to-day, how 
would he go from New York to San 
Francisco ?" and the "ruling" elder an- 
swered, "He'd ride a mule." Christ com- 
manded his people to "go," but he did not 

177 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

say how, because he knew when he gave 
the Great Commission that the methods 
of travel and the circumstances of life 
would vary with the country and the age. 
And if Jesus were in the flesh now he 
would make the fast trains and the swift 
steamers and the telephone and the tele- 
graph, wire and wireless, and the press, 
periodical and daily, tributary to his 
kingdom. Let us not be confused by 
many organizations and enterprises in 
the church. Whatever really helps in the 
execution of the last will and testament 
of our Lord is worth while. This justi- 
fies the Bible School and Christian En- 
deavor and the ladies' aid and missionary 
societies and educational institutions and 
church papers. 

The enterprise of the Lord Jesus 

Christ is so vital and so immense that 

, „, „ it demands the hearty, 

Its Challenge - . . ,. ■" 

. y . enthusiastic co-operation 

r ^f IC " of all his followers. But 

tt °T . , C ^ the Great Commission 

Heeded by the , . . ~ - - 

„„ n „, , also simplifies the work 

Whole Church £ - -f - „,, 

of the church, there is 
only one thing to do — go into all the 
world and preach the gospel to the whole 
creation. However, this is the biggest 
job in the world, and there are many 

178 



THE GREAT COMMISSION 

ways of going at it or taking hold of it. 
No man or society can monopolize this 
task, and there must be liberty and for- 
bearance and tolerance here. No secre- 
tary has the right to ridicule the church, 
or to crack the whip of authority over the 
head of the preacher, that fails to take an 
offering for his particular propaganda. 
Many a congregation, struggling heroic- 
ally with the problems of its own com- 
munity, finds it impossible to answer 
every outside call for help; but it is as 
true as steel to the Lord of the harvest. 
But the culmination of Christ's work 
waits for the union of His people. There 
is no excuse for sects and denominations 
but narrowness and prejudice and bigotry, 
which the Great Commission, recogniz- 
ing the broad equality of men and rising 
above race and condition and time, is 
destined to destroy. The universality of 
the enterprise of Jesus and the very 
genius of the Great Commission will 
eventually compel His professed follow- 
ers to unite. And in the clear light of 
day, it will be seen that all who hug to 
their hearts and thrust on their fellows 
unauthorized tenets and wear unscrip- 
tural, divisive names have not His Spirit 
and are none of His. God speed the day 

179 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

when the testimony of His united church 
shall compel the world to believe that He 
sent Jesus (John 17: 21, 22). 

Review Questions 

144 (1) Why was the ministry of 
Jesus limited to the Jews? 

145 (2) What are the five records 
of the Great Commission? 

146 (3) Did its magnitude demand 
repetition and tax all modes of expression? 

147 (4) Why is it the climax of the 
divine plan for humanity? 

148 (5) Why does it announce the 
rich provision of God for all? 

149 (6) How does it, based on love 
as authority, prove its originator divine? 

150 (7) How is it the Nezv Cove- 
nant unfolded by Acts and the Epistles? 

151 (8) Hozv does the Great Com- 
mission save the church? 

152 (9) Why is it the only salva- 
tion for the sinner and hope for the 
Christian? 

153 (10) Why does the Great Com- 
mission wisely prescribe no method of 
procedure? 

154 (11) How will its challenge 
bring victory when heeded by the whole 
church? 

180 



XII 

THE CHURCH 

THE word "church/' meaning in its 
Greek origin an assembly called out 
by the magistrate, or by legitimate au- 
*«i_ *. rtlJ thority, is peculiar to the 

Why the Old AT -Vf, * , , . 

_ „ , New lestament, and is 

Testament Had , 1 , M '. 

N Ch h u describe the insti- 

tution created by the 
Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, Jehovah 
has had faithful servants from the begin- 
ning. But, as we have seen, the only 
establishment in the Patriarchal Age was 
the home, and later the nation developed. 
While the Jewish economy was religious 
and reinforced the family against apos- 
tasy, it was a state rather than a church. 
It was the development or the fulfillment 
of the first promise to Abraham (Gen. 
12: 1-3), which was earthly and temporal 
(Gal. 4: 21-31) ; and, though it had many 
types of what was to follow and rang 
with the prophecy of something better, 
it was itself of this world. The church 
is not Jewish, but Christian, and there- 
fore it is beyond the Old Testament. 

181 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

The Jews understood neither the sym- 
bolical meaning of the law of Moses nor 
the spiritual message of their prophets. 
And they expected their Messiah, by 
genius of organization and ability of 
leadership and power of conquest, to 
throw off the Roman yoke that galled 
their necks and make their kingdom su- 
preme among the nations. 

And the church is the actual begin- 
ning of the kingdom of heaven on earth. 
Wh h ^^ e ^dividual member is 

~ J* J ^ the unit fundamental to 

Could Not Exist . ., ^. , .^ 

»,.„ „ any institution, and it 

Till Pentecost J . ., , '■ , , 

was impossible to estab- 
lish the church till the perfect model for 
its members had been given. And noth- 
ing short of the sinless life of Jesus could 
serve as this pattern. Unlike other books, 
the Bible records the imperfections of its 
heroes; and only in Jesus Christ was its 
ideal reached. All its other characters 
are so set in their time that to follow 
them would mean to go backward, which 
is impossible. But to respond to the 
leadership of Christ is to go forward in 
knowledge and life and to climb upward 
in hope and aspiration. Neither will it 
suffice merely to describe the divine stand- 
ard by rules and commandments, as is 

182 



THE CHURCH 



seen in the failure of the law of Moses. 
Men must have the demonstration of the 
truth and the application of the law and 
the inspiration of the life to guide them. 
Moreover, there can be no kingdom with- 
out a king. Jesus had pre-eminence, but 
it was impossible for Him to be King in 
the flesh because the genius of His king- 
dom is spiritual. The only regalia He 
ever wore consisted of a scarlet robe and 
a crown of thorns and a reed forced upon 
Him in mockery (Matt. 27: 27-31). But 
after He had realized the very acme of 
human life and conquered death, He set 
His throne in heaven and created His 
church on earth by sending His Spirit 
into the hearts of the Twelve on the first 
Pentecost that followed His resurrection. 
Before that great and memorable day, on 
which His church was born, neither the 
prophets (1 Pet. 1: 10, 11) nor the Apos- 
tles (Acts 1:6), nor any other human 
being, understood the real character of 
His kingdom. 

The church is the climax of God's 
plan for this world. It blesses and hal- 
lows the home (Eph. 6: 1-9) and safe- 
guards and glorifies the nation. It harks 
backward to primal instinct and forward 
to holy aspiration, rises above the preju- 

183 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 



dicial or the artificial or the accidental in 

society, and gives the heart saneness and 

_. „ . . sweetness and breadth 

The Cost of the - 
Ideal of the a & reat Common 

Church brotherhood (Gal. 3: 28). 

But this glorious ideal, 
our most valuable heritage, came through 
awful sacrifice. The prophets who gave 
visions of it lost their lives, the Lord who 
illustrated it perfectly was murdered, and 
the Apostles and many others who fol- 
lowed closely in the steps of the Master 
were slain by the perverse generations in 
the midst of whom they lived. But the 
Lord based His church so deeply in the 
eternal realm that the storms of time can 
neither move nor shake it. He fore- 
shadowed His foundation in the Old Tes- 
tament and made His own personal min- 
istry fundamental to His reign in the 
world. With John the Baptizer and the 
Twelve and the Seventy, He cried out: 
"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is 
at hand." And He has purchased for us 
at the price of His own life that which is 
infinitely worthy of any sacrifice on our 
part. 

The New Testament guides the 
church both by precept and by example. 
It is fortunate that we do not have to 

184 



THE CHURCH 



look forward to some imaginary congre- 
gation for our model, but back to the first 
Th m d 1 church in Jerusalem. The 
_. . . _ Apostles themselves were 

Church in Jeru- J . r « r J 1 . ~ 

the nucleus of this first 
assembly of the saints; 
and it was perfect spiritually, as the 
first man was perfect physically. Here 
we find the things in which to continue — 
the Apostles' teaching, fellowship, break- 
ing of bread and prayer (Acts 2:42), 
the enthusiasm of love that puts earthly 
treasure at the call of the needy, the 
power of discipline, and the grace that 
transforms calamity into missionary en- 
deavor, and sacrifices life to extend the 
kingdom into new places. This church 
also had mighty power to save the lost in 
its own community. It won three thou- 
sand souls on the first day of its life, and 
the saved were added to it day by day 
(Acts 2: 47). It had the unity for which 
the Lord prayed, and it reaped the har- 
vest of His patient sowing. 

The church is the mystical body of 
Christ (Eph. 1:22, 23). Having shown 
men how to live, He gives His Spirit to 
all that accept Him, that they may repro- 
duce His life in the world. And every 
one who has not His Spirit is alien to His 

185 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

kingdom, whatever his professions may 
be (Rom. 8:9). Surely humanity needs 
iM. ™_ t. t r His personal touch ; but 

The Church Is for TT 11 , i- i 

Al _ TT . , He could not live always, 

the Universal . . ^ n i 

., ., i £ nor again, in the flesh. 

Manifestation of A j 1 tt 

„, . And when He was a man 

Christ TT .. 

among men, He was lim- 
ited by time to about thirty-three years 
and by space to the land of Canaan. But 
now that He is in heaven, He can mani- 
fest Himself whenever and wherever He 
has faithful disciples. And this is the 
primary purpose of the church. It is the 
duty of those who believe in Him in every 
community, however small in number, to 
band themselves together to create an at- 
mosphere in which they can grow in His 
grace and knowledge (2 Pet. 3: 18), and 
to develop power by the union of their 
strength, under the blessing of the Holy 
Spirit, to save the lost. 

Many a congregation is powerless be- 
cause its members neglect the study of 
the Word of God, the 
lyztd ^Neg^t earnestness of prayer, the 

and Schism f raCe ? f £ 1V1 ^' the , ™ l 7 

ture of worship and the 

ministration of the gospel. They make 

no serious attempt to live like the Lord 

Jesus Christ, and the spirit of the world 

186 



THE CHURCH 



dominates them. Besides, false doctrines 
have crept in, and the church has been 
rent asunder. Not satisfied with the sim- 
ple faith of the New Testament, ambi- 
tious leaders have written their own for- 
mulations as creeds. And the Lord Jesus 
Christ has been displaced in the name of 
His church that a method or an ordi- 
nance or a polity or a man might be 
honored. Thus confusion and strife are 
engendered in every place and the church 
is well-nigh paralyzed. 

The only remedy for this deplorable 

condition is to burn the creeds that men 

The Only Cure h ? Ve written (they would 

for This Paralysis f Ve ™ re W. m C0W " 
flagration than they ever 

gave in propagation), or let them drop 

out of sight as relics of the troubled past, 

avoid unscriptural teaching as the poison 

of Satan, let the New Testament interpret 

itself, 'have no test of church fellowship 

but the divine creed that Jesus is the 

Christ, the Son of the living God, and 

obedience to Him, and honor Him only in 

the name of His body. When primitive 

Christianity is restored in doctrine and 

in practice, the church will be efficient in 

the Lord's work wherever it exists, as it 

was originally in Jerusalem. It seems 

187 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

that the Devil is trying to destroy the peo- 
ple of Christ according to His own prin- 
ciple that no kingdom can stand divided 
against itself. And that the church has 
survived both the stagnation of indiffer- 
ence and the shame of division is proof 
of its divinity. Only the Great Physician 
can save the paralyzed from death. If 
the church will honor her Lord above all 
men, she shall yet recover her strength 
and vanquish every enemy. 

The church is simply organized. In- 
deed, it may exist without any organiza- 
^ ™ ^ ^ tion at all. But the care 

The Church Or- r ., , •, ,< 

. . , _ of its members and the 

gamzed for Care . - ., 

, n conquest of its territory 

and Conquest \ t . - , . J 

require certain functions. 
The first church had the direct counsel of 
the Apostles, till its members acted on the 
advice of the Master and fled to save 
their lives when the Roman legions sur- 
rounded Jerusalem and threatened to de- 
stroy all its inhabitants. The Twelve 
themselves served this church "in prayer 
and in the ministry of the word" (Acts 
6: 1-6). And when the necessity arose 
for a different kind of service — dispens- 
ing the bounty of the church to those in 
need — the Apostles refused to neglect 
their peculiar work and the most im- 

188 



THE CHURCH 



portant service of the church, for which 
nobody else was qualified at that time, 
called the congregation together, and ad- 
vised that seven competent brethren be 
selected whom they might appoint over 
that business. And the brethren who 
serve the church in this, or similar, 
capacity are commonly called deacons 
(Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:8-13); while those 
who look after .the spiritual interests of 
the church are designated as elders (1 
Tim. 5: 17; 1 Pet. 5: 1-4), bishops (Acts 
20:28), pastors (Eph. 4:11), teachers 
(1 Cor. 12:28; 1 Tim. 5: 17) or minis- 
ters ( 1 Cor. 3:5); and those who, like 
Timothy and Titus, "set in order the 
things that are wanting," and preach the 
gospel to sinners, are termed evangelists 
(Eph. 4: 11). And this plain organiza- 
tion is purely congregational and articu- 
lates with the simple needs of the church, 
which are to develop the saved and save 
the lost. The New Testament knows no 
ecclesiastical authority aside from Christ 
and His Apostles, under whom each 
church is supreme in its own affairs. 

But office is not at all essential to 
service. Every member of the church 
should be the servant of his brethren and 
the savior of sinners. All must help in 

189 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

the finances of the church, visit the sick, 

encourage the weak, stir up the negligent, 

. . A , „ bless the faithful, attend 

And the Proper ,, , . A 

^. . . , T . the regular sessions, and 

Division of Labor ,** 11',, 

preach the gospel both by 

word of mouth and by act of life. There 
is much that the good women can do, and 
they are quick to do it in every congrega- 
tion. In these modern days we have the 
Bible School, in which every teacher is a 
pastor of the class. That one man should 
be the pastor of a church is neither Scrip- 
tural nor wise. This is too big a job for 
any one person. In every New Testa- 
ment church there is a plurality of elders, 
or pastors, or bishops. The chief func- 
tion of him who is called the pastor, or 
the minister, is to "labor in the word and 
in teaching" (l Tim. 5:17); and no 
church can make its preacher "serve 
tables/' or load him down with the busi- 
ness affairs of the congregation, or de- 
prive him of sufficient time for study and 
meditation and prayer, without working 
irreparable injury to its own life. The 
congestion in one man of responsibility 
for the work of the officers and the mem- 
bers of the church has made many a poor 
preacher and many a sorry congregation. 
There is one standard of life for all 

190 



THE CHURCH 



Christians, which is detailed for bishops 

and deacons to make them models for the 

other members of the church (1 Tim. 3: 

1-12). And it is obligatory on every one 

who accepts Jesus Christ to serve Him 

with his best gifts, whether they be to 

preach or to minister or to teach or to 

exhort or to sing or to pray or to give or 

to rule or to show mercy (Rom. 12: 3-8). 

The church is the mother of all living. 

Christ reaches sinners with the gospel 

_. „ . . through the church. And 

The Saved Are & ,, , , - 

B N t every one that hears and 

"Jome d,"int°othe bdieV f s . and ° b ^ s . ^ 
Church gospel is saved, and. the 

Lord adds him to the 
church (Acts 2: 47). The terms of par- 
don — faith in Jesus as the Son of God 
(Acts 16: 31-33), repentance of sin (Acts 
2:38), confession of the Christ (Matt. 
20:32, 33; Rom. 10:9, 10) and baptism 
(Acts 2:38; 22: 16) — are also the con- 
ditions of admission into the church. The 
process by which a man is saved from 
his past sins and the process by which he 
becomes a member of the church of 
Christ is one and the same (Rom. 15: 7). 
People do not join the church. They 
obey the gospel, and the Lord sets them 
in the body (1 Cor. 12: 18). We "join 

13 191 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

the church" only in the sense of identi- 
fying ourselves with an organized body 
of believers, and this every Christian 
should be glad to do. The church, there- 
fore, includes all Christians, or penitent, 
obedient believers in Jesus Christ. But 
the church is charged with the responsi- 
bility of the Great Commission, which 
passes from generation to generation (2 
Tim. 2:2), and is to love sinners as Jesus 
did and bring them to Him. And to say 
that any can be saved without the church 
is to say that one can be born without a 
mother. Yet no church can bring forth 
spiritual children save by travail of soul 
on the part of its members (Isa. 66: 7, 8). 
The church also protects nations, pre- 
serves society, creates civilization and 

_, -, . makes communities fit 

The Glorious , . , . , . ,. 

c • tsx. places in which to live. 

Service of the t -r • , i 

Church ls an unworthy 

citizen who withholds 
support or gives meagerly or niggardly to 
the church, and more so if he is wealthy 
or owns property; and it might open his 
eyes and break his heart if the good influ- 
ences of the church could be withdrawn 
long enough for his possessions to de- 
teriorate in value. The church is the 
army of God. But, like her great Cap- 

192 



THE CHURCH 



tain, she fights only sin and the Devil, and 
sacrifices herself to save the world. To 
the church, Jesus bequeathed His fountain 
of benevolence for distribution to all men 
without money and without price. And 
the fraternal orders that have grown up 
in her shadow or thrived in her atmos- 
phere, as symptoms of a confused age, 
and that limit their beneficence to their 
own narrow circles, shall cease to be. 
But the church shall continue forever. 
The church is the only organization that 
has the virility to live and to grow by 
freewill offerings. And, like her Lord, 
she is no respecter of persons, but ready 
to bless and to serve all. Only the church 
can safely guide the innate religious im- 
pulse or satisfy the yearning of the 
human spirit, and this she can do because 
she is not of the world. Earth is our 
theater ; but both our Head, Jesus Christ, 
and Supreme Court, the Apostles, whose 
will and decision abide in the eternal 
record, and our departed brethren, are in 
heaven. 

The church is the most wonderful of 
institutions. It reaches back in its foun- 
dation to the prophets and to the Apos- 
tles and to Jesus Christ as its corner- 
stone (Eph. 2: 19-22; Luke 20: 17), and 

193 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 



it is built upon the solid rock of eternal 
truth. Anxious to conserve its doctrine, 

TW TWfnW »«A Which iS neitheI " ° ld n0r 

I he Doctrine ana , . . . •, , 

_ . new, but timeless, and not 

Operations , ' « * - . 

of the Church always able to disengage 
its authoritative teaching 
from the circumstances in which it orig- 
inated, the church has not been equal 
to the world in the wisdom of its opera- 
tions. Yet the church has succeeded 
marvelously in spite of the dull instru- 
ments and the clumsy apparatus with 
which it has often done its work. The 
reluctance to allow splendid musical in- 
struments in the public worship because, 
forsooth, the world used them, has been 
overcome. And why not rescue the 
magic-lantern and the moving-picture 
machine from unworthy uses and conse- 
crate them to the high purposes of relig- 
ion and education ? It can not but deepen 
the impression and heighten the effect to 
reach the mind and heart through both 
the eye and the ear. With up-to-date 
methods and adequate publicity, such as 
Jesus used to get the attention of the peo- 
ple (Luke 10: 1), the church can greatly 
multiply her success. What we need is 
not more machinery, but more life. Jesus 
was an inspirer rather than an organizer. 

194 



THE CHURCH 



Let the church publish His glory and joy, 
and conquer the world in His name! 

Review Questions 

155 (1) Why did the Old Testa- 
ment have no church? 

156 (2) Why could not the church 
exist till Pentecost? 

157 (3) What was the cost of the 
ideal of the church? 

158 (4) What do we find in the 
model church in Jerusalem? 

159 (5) Why and how is the church 
for the universal manifestation of Christ? 

160 (6) How is the church para- 
lyzed by neglect and schism? 

161 (7) What is the only cure for 
this paralysis? 

162 (8) How is the church organ- 
ized for care and conquest? 

163 (9) What is the principle of 
the proper division of labor in the church ? 

164 (10) Why are the saved born, 
not <{ joined," into the church? 

165 (11) What is the glorious serv- 
ice of the church? 

166 (12) How has its desire to con- 
serve the doctrine affected the operations 
of the church? 



195 



XIII 

THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

THHE world has built monuments to its 

* great men. But the name of Jesus 

Christ shall be kept above all others till 

_. _ .... the end of time by three 

The Imperishable . . . . , r jt 

., r institutions within the 

Monuments of « , t -^ 

Ch . church; namely, Baptism, 

the Lord's Supper and 
the Lord's Day. These are His imperish- 
able monuments. Let us look at them in 
their relation to Him, in the hope of re- 
moving prejudice and settling contro- 
versy. Baptism is a picture of His burial 
and resurrection, the Lord's Supper re- 
lates to His death and second coming, and 
the Lord's Day celebrates his rising again 
from the dead. 

Jesus Himself was baptized (Matt. 3: 

13-17). And the facts and the circum- 

„. .„ , stances of His baptism, 

Significance of £ , 1 1 j 

* _ . often overlooked, are 

the Baptism r , . , , 

fundamental to a proper 
understanding of this 
mooted question. Through the signifi- 
cance of His baptism comes a flood of 

196 



THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

light that enables us to interpret the whole 
subject of baptism as it relates to men. 
He walked about eighty miles from Naza- 
reth to the Jordan, where John was bap- 
tizing; and He was baptized as a humble 
citizen. It was not convenient for Him 
to be baptized, but He overcame all diffi- 
culties. There is no question that He 
was immersed. Scholarship is agreed on 
this point, and the mere unbiased reading 
of the English text leads inevitably to the 
same conclusion. And none should accept 
the false substitute of affusion; but all 
should be baptized as Jesus was, even at 
the sacrifice of time and energy and 
bodily comfort. Baptism is essentially 
heroic. Jesus was praying at the time of 
His baptism (Luke 3:21). Ananias 
found Saul praying and baptized him. 
Any penitent believer, or fit subject for 
baptism, will pray, of course ; but he must 
not substitute prayer for obedience (Matt. 
7 : 21 ) . Prayer is action as well as words, 
and baptism is prayer to God for for- 
giveness. Jesus was baptized to fulfill all 
righteousness. He took the place of the 
sinner, doing everything demanded of the 
sinner, save one — to repent of sin — which 
He could not do, because He sinned not. 
But His baptism, like that of the sinner, 

197 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

marked an epoch in His life: it closed the 
obscurity of Nazareth and opened the 
way for service. At His baptism, God 
acknowledged Him as His Son in whom 
He was well pleased, in audible voice that 
rang up and down the Jordan valley and 
over the hills, and awed the people into 
reverence and worship and wonder and 
amazement; and the Holy Spirit came 
upon Him in the form of a dove, thus 
visibly anointing, or inducting, Him into 
the office of Prophet, the world's great 
Teacher. Likewise, when the sinner is 
baptized he receives the Holy Spirit to 
help and bless him in the Christian life 
(Acts 2: 38). 

Jesus commanded baptism. Adminis- 
tered in the triune name of the Godhead, 

™_ ^. . -r, • baptism has back of it 
The Divine Prm- ,, r ,, ., £ TT 

the authority of Heaven, 

TT . T, , .. to which earth must bow 
Unique Relation . , , , , + . 

. in humble obedience. 

Those who will not sub- 
mit to Christian baptism stay out of the 
church because they are not loyal to 
Christ. Indeed, none can be baptized into 
Christ unless their hearts are purified by 
faith and their lives are transformed by 
repentance. But, while baptism changes 
the state and relation to God, it touches 

198 



THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

the heart also; for the conscience, a part 
of the heart, is never right without bap- 
tism. And it is impossible for any to live 
the Christian life whose faith is not equal 
to the test of baptism in the beginning. 
Jesus promised salvation to all that be- 
lieve and are baptized (Mark 16: 16). 
And it is impossible to diagram "Repent 
ye, and be baptized every one of you in 
the name of Jesus Christ unto the remis- 
sion of your sins" (Acts 2: 38), without 
allowing the phrase "unto the remission 
of your sins" to modify the verb "be bap- 
tized." 

Here, as wherever it speaks, the Bible 
is right, and whoever takes issue with it 
xi c .*i .1. is wrong. And the Eng- 

How to Settle the ,. , -r»-i_i i 1 • 

-. A . . lish Bible speaks so plam- 

Questionof , ,,. r u . J , u , 

Ba tism ^ on subject that 

anybody above infancy or 
idiocy, though he does not know Hebrew 
from a goose's foot or Greek from a pig's 
track, can settle this question for himself 
by reading and believing and obeying 
what the Book says! There is only one 
thing to do with a command — obey it. 
Saul, vainly thinking it all right to 
modify God's command utterly to destroy 
the Amalekites and all they possessed, lost 
his kingdom, and died by his own hand on 

199 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

the battlefield. Lot's wife felt that no 
harm could come from violating the 
angel's command not to look back, but she 
became a pillar of salt, unfeeling and in- 
sensate. Achan imagined he could steal 
and dissemble and keep his sin a secret, 
but he was stoned and burned. Uzzah 
touched the ark in violation of the law, 
and fell down dead. Naaman was still a 
leper till he obeyed the divine order to 
wash in the Jordan seven times. Eve ate 
the forbidden fruit, and the whole world 
weeps and mourns and groans in the very 
jaws of death. God does not trifle with 
men, neither will He allow them to trifle 
with Him. The proper attitude toward 
baptism is neither argument nor evasion 
nor substitution, but obedience — be bap- 
tized! 

But baptism is not an arbitrary com- 
mandment. Its chief glory is in its spirit- 
-■•.•„..» ual significance, which 

Baptism Suits Ac- , /- j •, • 1 

. , „ , also finds its interpreta- 

tion of Body to T r^\ ' a. tz 

_ . . tion in Jesus Christ. If 

Penitence of , . J 

s . . baptism were a mere 

bodily act, a man could 
be baptized in his sleep. That is not all 
of the Mississippi that billows into the 
Gulf of Mexico, but it is the Mississippi 
clear back to Lake Itaska in Minnesota, 

200 



THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

where it is only twelve feet wide. Bap- 
tism can be seen, but it can not all be 
seen; for it is baptism to the widest 
widths of the sinner's soul, to the deepest 
depths of the penitent's heart and to the 
highest heights of the believer's faith. If 
it is not a spiritual act, it is a mere form 
and blasphemy in the sight of God. It 
supplies the deep need of the human heart 
(1 Pet. 3:21; 1 John 3:20, 21). Mere 
words can not express the sorrow and the 
penitence and the faith and the love of 
the sinner's heart seeking the Lord; and 
Christ has put in his path this luminously 
illustrative, this powerfully expressive, 
this gloriously beautiful, this, wonderfully 
significant, act of baptism. God sent 
Jesus because His love demanded expres- 
sion in action. Mary spent all her money 
for precious ointment to pour on the head 
of her Lord, because she loved Him. 
Likewise, the penitent sinner delights to 
be baptized, for baptism satisfies his own 
soul and gives him the assurance of ac- 
ceptance with Christ. Baptism is fellow- 
ship with Jesus in His death and burial 
and resurrection and new life (Rom. 6: 
3-7). We are baptized into His death, 
where He shed His blood, and raised in 
likeness of His resurrection to live a new 

201 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

life with Him as the conqueror of death. 

But the baptized believer, or the 

Christian, in order to grow in this new 

How Tesus Safe- Hfe (2 C ° r * 5l 17) > mUSt 
be reminded of the Lord 

a S " af .t Jesus Christ constantly. 

Against Forget- J T . , A J 

. R . Jesus knew the tendency 

of the human heart to 
wrap itself up in the present and forget 
the past. And, though He knew that one 
of His own would betray Him, and that 
Gethsemane, full of agony and sweat of 
blood, and the cruel, painful, ignominious, 
shameful death of Calvary, were at 
hand, He forgot His own suffering and 
thought of the coming years and centu- 
ries and ages. Thus he manifested His 
overshadowing greatness and marked 
Himself as the Son of God. And, with 
this keen foresight and acute sympathy, 
He instituted His own supper that His 
disciples, by eating the bread and drink- 
ing the cup, might proclaim His death 
till He comes again (1 Cor. 11: 17-34). 
No greater calamity could befall us than 
to forget Him, our greatest Benefactor, 
and lose the light He shines along our 
pathway. 

And so the Lord's Supper is the 
greatest commemorative institution in all 

202 



THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

time. It serves as evidence of Jesus. No 
Israelite who ate the passover could ques- 

H L <r t * on t ^ ie P ower an< ^ m i&ht 

e or< ^ g^ - which the Red 

Supper Evinces 0111 • 1 

H" L*f a en miracu l° us " 

ly opened that his ances- 
tors might escape from slavery and 
worship Jehovah according to His law. 
No Jew that looked upon the pile of 
stones by the Jordan could deny that 
Jehovah had made a dry pathway through 
the surging waters of that river for his 
forefathers to come into the Promised 
Land. In our great annual patriotic 
celebration, who doubts that on the 
fourth of July, 1776, the American col- 
onies declared themselves free from Great 
Britain! In like manner, yea, with much 
greater power, the Lord's Supper proves 
that Jesus lived and that the things writ- 
ten of Him in the New Testament are 
true. 

But it is not enough to recognize Him 
as a great historical character. We must 
a j^ * t. tt l° ve Him and keep Him 

And Refreshes Us . , r r 

.,, „. , in our hearts forever. 

with His Love .* T - - , 

No monetary value could 
be put upon the picture of father and 
mother that hangs in our home, for it is a 
memento of our best earthly friends, re- 

203 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

freshing our poor hearts with their blessed 

memory every day. And so when we eat 

the bread and drink the cup of the Lord, 

we are made strong and vigorous to do 

His work in the world. These emblems 

make the Lord tangible. They remind us 

that He gave His flesh and blood and life 

for us, and should move us to give our best 

for Him. He gave Himself, and He wants 

us. He can use our possessions in His 

kingdom, but no mere gift of money will 

satisfy the heart of our Lord. And to 

receive Him is to let Him receive us. In 

observing His supper, we proclaim His 

death for our redemption as the greatest 

evidence of His love, and anticipate His 

second coming, when He shall receive all 

His own into His glory. 

Therefore, the Lord's Supper should 

be properly celebrated. It is not to feed 

Ti T - x . the body, as baptism is not 

It Is for the , « J ' ., u r , u , , 

« . -. , «-r ,, to cleanse it ; but both are 

Spiritual Welfare - ,- - ' - ,- . . 

tl . „. . t . for the sake of the spirit, 

of the Christian Tj . . , r - 

It is a crime to turn the 
Lord's Supper into a bacchanalian feast, 
as the Corinthians did. But no one 
should refuse to eat the bread and drink 
the cup because he has sinned. Let him 
rather repent and take the emblems with 
a prayer for forgiveness and help to keep 

204 



THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

clean and pure, and discern the Lord's 
body. But each one must examine him- 
self before eating and drinking. This 
eliminates the question of open or close 
communion : there is no such thing taught 
in the Bible. No man, no set of men, 
organized into a church or not, have the 
right to sit in judgment on another to de- 
cide whether he should take the com- 
munion or not. This is purely a per- 
sonal matter, and every communicant 
must decide and bear the whole respon- 
sibility for himself. 

And this self-examination is healthful. 
It is good for a man to get acquainted 

* j «, ^ with his wife's husband 
And Blesses the , , . , MJ , r ^ 

„ and his children s father, 

Communicant r . , , 

with Self a woman t0 know her 

. , * husband's wife and the 

knowledge - - , , 

mother of her sons and 

daughters, and for everybody to under- 
stands his neighbor's neighbor. There is 
a tendency to look away from ourselves 
and to magnify the faults of others. And 
we, like David, would not recognize our 
own character if pictured in another. The 
benefit of self-examination before the 
Lord is twofold: (1) It will keep us hum- 
ble, enabling us to heed Paul's injunction 
not to think too highly of ourselves 

205 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

(Rom. 12:3). Who, when he sees sin 
in his own heart as he sits by his Lord, 
can exalt himself! (2) It will make us 
charitable toward our brethren. Any 
man who really knows the Lord and him- 
self is ready to love the wayward back 
into faithful service. Charity toward 
others is a mark of goodness in ourselves. 
Every man is himself the glass through 
which he looks, and what he sees in 
others depends on what is in him. Hear- 
ing an old man say that no man was 
honest and no woman virtuous, I pro- 
nounced him a rascal himself, looking 
through a glass so smoky that he could 
see nothing good. 

Let us remember, also, that we com- 
mune with the Lord, not with one another 

A A*. TUT *TV C 1 C0r ' 10: 16 )' lt iS aS 

And the Most Di- .> TT J « ' ., , 

- . if He sat by our side; and 

rect Communion , / u , . • .* 

..i. t we have fellowship with 

with Jesus TT . . a a.' £ 

Him, sweet and satisfy- 
ing. And we should be glad to partake 
of this feast "often" — that is the word 
He used, though He did not fix the time. 
However, it was the custom of the early 
church to enjoy this communion on the 
first day of the week (Acts 20: 7). And 
the record means every first day of the 
week, of course ; just as when we say that 

206 



THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

the schools have holiday on Saturday, we 
mean every Saturday. Why should we 
cheat ourselves by communing with Jesus 
once a month, once a quarter, once in six 
months or once a year, when we may do 
so once a week? And there could be 
nothing wrong in celebrating the Lord's 
Supper oftener, if it is properly done. 

Hence, it is necessary for the Chris- 
tian to give at least one day in seven to 

The Occasion of meditation and P ra y er 

.1. t j. ^ and worship. lhere is 
the Lords Day - r . - 

the same necessity for a 

rest-day that there has always been. But 
we rest now from "secular pursuit" on 
the first day of the week, or the Lord's 
Day, in celebration of His resurrection, 
which is the beginning of the new crea- 
tion, and much greater than the comple- 
tion of the old creation commemorated by 
the old Jewish Sabbath. Now the Sab- 
bath and the Lord's Day must be distin- 
guished from one another, because one is 
of the Old Testament and the other of 
the New (Rom. 8:7-13). As we have 
before had occasion to note, the law of 
Moses, a part of which is the command 
to keep the Sabbath, has been done away ; 
and Jesus Christ has superseded Moses as 
authoritative Teacher. Nowhere in the 

14 207 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

New Testament are the members of the 
church of Christ commanded to "remem- 
ber the sabbath day, to keep it holy." 

Neither are we commanded to keep 
any day, but we are at liberty to esteem 
™ „ . ., - every day alike. Every 

The Privilege of , J « / , , , , , ,*? 

l <r d y should be holy to the 

* ! ° r f. a . y Christian (Rom. 14:5, 

vs. the Restriction r N -n i • j J 

of the Sabbath ?>• _ ^ r epnmanded 
the Galatians for observ- 
ing days and months and seasons and 
years (Gal. 4:8-11). The Sabbath was 
a day to be kept by one nation ; the Lord's 
Day is for the universal celebration of the 
greatest event in the history of the world. 
Of course, both man and beast should 
rest from their labor one day out of seven 
days, but Jesus has not governed this by 
a hard-and-fast command. He has left it 
rather a question of liberty, which all 
who love Him and know themselves are 
glad to exercise in the right way. If the 
commandment to keep the Sabbath is yet 
obligatory, why is not the penalty of death 
still inflicted for its transgression? It is 
a misnomer to call the Lord's Day the 
Sabbath, and it betrays a lack of definite 
Bible knowledge. Jesus observed the Sab- 
bath because he lived and died under the 
law of Moses. And the Apostles often 

208 



THE CHRISTIAN MEMORIALS 

preached on the Sabbath because those to 
whom they preached still worshiped on 
that day, not being aware that the Chris- 
tian Era had begun. But the old order has 
long since passed away, and let us not 
confound it with the new any longer. 

The Lord's Day is the most notable 
of all days, because it began by the en- 

^ „ . . trance of Jesus into im- 
The Superiority , ,., J T . ,, 

r ^ t j» « mortality. It was the oc- 
of the Lord s Day . J P TT . 

casion of His appearance 

to His disciples after His resurrection. 
It was the day when John saw his won- 
derful vision of the Revelation. And it 
is the time when we, too, not being in the 
Spirit as John was, but having the Spirit 
in us, may see visions and dream dreams. 
On this blessed day the saints assemble 
in the name of the Lord to remember 
Him in His own appointed way. And 
this they do, not because ^hey are com- 
manded, but because they like to be car- 
ried back to the incarnation of the Lord, 
lifted into His present fellowship and 
winged by faith to the day of His second 
coming. And thus the Lord's Days are 
"seasons of refreshing from the presence 
of the Lord" (Acts 3: 19), when we "sit 
with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ 
Jesus" (Eph. 2:6). 

209 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

Review Questions 

167 (1) What are the three im- 
perishable monuments of Christ? 

168 (2) What is the significance of 
the baptism of Jesus? 

169 (3) What is the divine prin- 
ciple and unique relation of baptism? 

170 (4) What is the only way to 
settle the question of baptism? 

171 (5) How does baptism suit ac- 
tion of body to penitence of spirit? 

172 (6) How does Jesus safeguard 
His against forgetting Him? 

173 (7) How does the Lord's Sup- 
per evince His life? 

17 A (8) How does it refresh us 
with His love? 

175 (9) Why and how is it for the 
spiritual welfare of the Christian? 

176 (10) How does it bless the com- 
municant with self-knowledge? 

177 (11) Why should this, the most 
direct communion with Jesus, be often? 

178 (12) What is the occasion of the 
lord's Day? 

179 (13) How does the privilege of 
the Lord's Day compare with the restric- 
tion of the Sabbath? 

180 (14) What is the superiority of 
the Lord's Day? 

210 



XIV 

THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

THE net result of all that has gone be- 
fore is the great trinity of abiding 
principles; namely, faith and hope and 
m , T , love (1 Cor. 13: 13). 

The Immortal ^ ,, « , y r 

v . l hese are the elements of 

Christianity, the final dis- 
pensation of the grace of God. To their 
development the good of all ages have 
contributed, and they are our most glori- 
ous heritage. Without them life is bar- 
ren and waste, but with them "the desert 
shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." 
In them all that is worth while of the past 
is conserved for the present and the 
future. Through them eternity projects 
itself into the realm of time, and they are 
the immortal virtues. They focus both 
the past and the future in the heart of 
their possessor at the present moment 

So fundamental to the well-being of 
man are faith and hope and love that God 
established them in the earth by His 
mighty power. Jehovah gave Moses 
power to work miracles to prove to all 

211 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

men that He called him to deliver his 
brethren from Egypt. Jesus manifested 

The Pur f ^ S su P erna tUral power 

MiradesThTeved £* We . "^ be ? bl | t0 

believe in Him as the bon 
of God. And God bore witness with the 
Apostles "both by signs and wonders, and 
by manifold powers, and by gifts of the 
Holy Spirit, according to his own will," 
that they might confirm salvation in the 
Lord (Heb. 2:1-4). To some were given 
the gifts of Apostles, or prophets, or 
teachers, or miracles, or healings, or 
helps, or governments, or tongues, that all 
might have the greater gifts of faith and 
hope and love, and walk in the most ex- 
cellent way (1 Cor. 12: 27-31). The pur- 
pose common to all the miracles of the 
New Testament is to magnify Jesus as 
the foundation of faith, as the encourage- 
ment of hope and as the example of love. 
And when this object was fully accom- 
plished in the days of the Apostles, there 
was a cessation of signs and wonders. 

But we have suffered no loss in the 
discontinuance of miracles. Faith and 
hope and love constitute perfection in this 
world. And now that these principles are 
fully established, there is no longer any 
necessity for miraculous gifts, by way of 

212 



THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

which they came. Miracles were only 
means of which the abiding principles are 
rm_ r» * A . e the end. The signs and 

The Perfection of , - . A1 P r~ 

T7 -.u tt j wonders of the New les- 

Faith, Hope and , rr r n . • 

- tament suffice for all time. 

Who cares for the sign 
when he has the thing signified? Indeed, 
to demand a repetition of the miracles 
recorded in the Word of God would be 
like garnering the bare stalk after the ear 
of corn has been plucked. Besides, one 
might have spectacular gifts and be able 
to prophesy, and be as bad as Balaam. 
But none can believe and hope and love 
without being clean of hands and pure 
of heart and righteous of life. No man 
now can speak in languages that he has 
not learned by laborious study, foretell 
the future, miraculously heal the sick or 
raise the dead. But everybody that has 
heard the gospel can believe in Jesus as 
the Son of God, hope for eternal life 
through Him and love both God and man. 
And faith and hope and love harmonize 
us with the law of God, glorify all time, 
past and present and future, sweeten and 
sanctify all the relationships of earth and 
sweep the gates of heaven. 

The most fundamental of the abiding 
principles is faith. Faith and belief may 

213 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

be used synonymously, but faith is the 

bigger word (Matt. 8: 10, 13). The evi- 

„*!_»*'. r dence is so great that 

The Meaning of , A , A j i i 

F . both demons and bad men 

can not but believe in the 
Lord (Jas. 2: 19). But such belief is 
mere intellectual assent and is not real 
faith, because faith is of the whole heart, 
which includes both the intellect and the 
affections and the will and the conscience. 
No better definition of faith was ever 
written than Paul's : "Assurance of things 
hoped for, a conviction of things not 
seen" (Heb. 11:1). And Paul shows 
faith the secret of all great lives. But 
we could not hope for anything without 
testimony, nor could we have any convic- 
tion of unseen things without evidence. 
And so God has made our faith deeper 
than the sea and higher than the heavens 
and broader than the earth. 

Faith is easy of access to those who 

have it not. All they have to do is to 

__ « - hear the Word of Christ 

sr < Rom - i0: i4 - i7 > ° r read 

the New Testament (John 
20 : 30, 31), and exercise properly the 
faculties with which the Creator has en- 
dowed them. Faith does not come origi- 
nally in answer to prayer, since "whatso- 

214 



THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

ever is not of faith is sin;" and a prayer 
without faith would be sinful, if, indeed, 
one who had no faith would pray at all 
(Rom. 14: 23). Of course, we may pray 
God to increase our faith; but even this 
prayer will not be answered unless we 
apply ourselves to the great source of 
faith — the Word of God. 

None can exercise faith as a miracu- 
lous gift now (1 Cor. 12: 8-11 ; Matt. 17: 
„,,_ ^ . ,20). But there is a 

The Function and u * £ -,«« /i^, 1 

Ob* f common faith (lit. 1: 

6 F ith ^ t * iat 1S P° ss ^ e t0 a ^> 

and for it we should ear- 
nestly contend (Jude 3). This faith is his- 
torical and divine and saving. It purifies 
every heart in which it finds a place, 
whether Jew or Gentile, and enlarges 
every life into which it comes (Rom. 6:17; 
Acts 15 : 7-9). Miserably small is he who 
shuts the door of faith. But to him who 
opens this door, life even in this world, 
in spite of its brief span of threescore 
years and ten, widens backward to Eden 
and forward to heaven. But there is 
only one object of faith; namely, Jesus 
of Nazareth. And this simplicity of pur- 
pose both accelerates and broadens the 
function of faith. We are not to believe 
in a mere fact nor in a set of facts, nor yet 

215 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

simply in a Book, but we are to believe in 
the man that was also God. The facts 
are to enable us to believe in Him. And 
He makes the Book intelligible and faith 
in God possible. Faith in Him illumi- 
nates the world with the divine purpose 
and attunes the heart to the law of 
heaven. Let us believe in Him with all 
our hearts forever! 

Hope is inspired by faith and relates 

to the unseen (Rom. 8:24, 25). Hope, 

-,,... r consisting of the two 

The Value of • * ■ i r j • 

„ simple elements of desire 

H °P e j -j. j.- 

and expectation, can not 

exist without faith. But faith is like- 
wise powerless to save without hope, with 
whose wings the soul wafts itself into 
eternity. Hope is valuable in itself. It 
lightens the burden of the day, turns 
darkness into light, sweetens the bitter 
cup, buries the dead past, heals the 
wounded heart, repairs the broken life, 
enhances the present and floods the future 
with glory. Its intrinsic worth is seen in 
the direction of its face. It never looks 
back, but always beholds the rising sun 
and the day after whose dawning no 
night shall come. Big things have hap- 
pened, but the biggest are yet to come. 
The man of hope is always young, not 

216 



THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

dreaming dreams of the past, but seeing 
visions of the future. It is charming to 
j _ . wander in the fairyland 

Y , of childhood, exhilarating 

to walk among the air- 
castles of youth and great to achieve in 
the strength and power of manhood and 
womanhood; but the most blessed of all 
is the ripeness of age. What if the out- 
ward man is decaying! the inward man 
is renewed day by day; let the feet totter 
if they must, they stand on the threshold 
of heaven and the palsied hand grasps the 
door-knob of God's eternal house; and 
with temporal things passing out of sight 
by the dimming of the bodily eye, the 
spiritual eye sees eternal things as never 
before (2 Cor. 4: 16-18). 

The mission of hope is to wean the 
soul from material things, which are 
* „ « . e , gross, ephemeral and 

And Purifies the ^ j j 

„ , -, doomed, and marry it 

Heart and Sharp- L . .' , ,, . * • * 

g . , to spiritual things, which 

are fine and evasive of 
the bodily senses, but perceptible to the 
spirit and immutable and indestructible. 
Hope purifies the heart (1 John 3: 1-3), 
and purity is the price of spiritual vision 
(Matt. 5:8). The things for which we 
hope are laid up for us in heaven, of which 

217 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

we have heard in the word of the truth of 
the gospel (Col. 1:5; 1 Pet. 1 : 13). The 
sea of time over which we sail becomes 
stormy and tempestuous; the clouds that 
lower above our heads, amid which the 
angry lightning flashes, startle us in fear 
by the deafening thunder and sweep the 
waves in fury against our frail bark. 
But hope anchors us to the eternal city, 
and we are safe, whatever happens (Heb. 
6: 17-20). By the light of hope we can 
see the end of our journey. We know 
not what may befall us to-day or to- 
morrow, but we do know that sooner or 
later we shall come into the haven of 
eternal rest. And hope charms us away 
from the troubled past as we go, and in- 
spires us to cast sin aside and throw into 
the sea all that hinders our progress. 

But love is the greatest of all. Love 

is the principle that determines the wor- 

. . , thiness of all gifts (1 

Love the Acme of ~ 10N tt Pi1 b , , v 

All Virtue Cor. 13). Without love, 
the orator sounds like 
brass or clangs like a cymbal, the prophet 
or the miracle-worker is nothing, and the 
benefactor of the poor or the fanatic has 
no reward. Love shows its unselfishness 
both by its positive and by its negative 
qualities. It is kind and sweet in the 

218 



THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

midst of suffering, takes no account of 
evil, rejoices not in unrighteousness, but 
with the truth only, and always seeks the 
good of others. It is utterly without envy 
or boast or pride or unseemly behavior or 
self-seeking or resentment, and it sacri- 
fices itself for the common welfare. To 
this end, it "beareth all things, believeth 
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all 
things." Though faith lights the way out 
of sin, it may die in the sinner's heart; 
and though hope reveals the silver lining 
in the dark cloud, it may fade away. But 
"love never faileth." Prophecies are done 
away in fulfillment, tongues cease and 
knowledge is swallowed up in greater 
knowledge. But love shall never be 
superseded. The great reputation of the 
prophet or the linguist or the philosopher 
will evaporate as the morning dew, but 
love is character and abides forever. 

Love is spontaneous (Matt. 26: 6-13). 
It needs no command, for its vision dis- 
The Initiative and Cer + nS *e right, and its 

the Divinity of "f tUre 1S }° SerVe and u . t0 
_ bless and to worship. 

Love is the strongest 

force in the universe. It drove Joseph of 

Arimathea and Nicodemus out of secrecy 

into open discipleship (John 19:38-42), 

219 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

and inspired Mary Magdalene, Mary the 
mother of James, and Salome, to go 
through darkness, braving all danger, to 
anoint the body of Jesus (Mark 16: 1). 
It constrained Paul (2 Cor. 5: 14) and 
the other Apostles to suffer persecution 
for the sake of serving Christ, led many 
to martyrdom, and impels millions to-day 
to do the bidding of the Lord. Yea, it 
moved God to send His Son, whom it also 
led to sacrifice Himself for the world. 
Love is indescribable. God, with His 
great mind and soul and heart, with all 
wisdom and power, with His omnipo- 
tence, omniscience and omnipresence, is 
defined as love (1 John 4:8). Love is 
life, but hate is death (1 John 3:14). 
Only the loving know God. Whoever 
hates can not apprehend Him. Love 
shall abide forever. But faith and hope 
belong only to man in this world. God 
does not believe — He knows ; neither does 
He hope — He realizes. But love is com- 
mon to God and man. Our faith shall 
become knowledge and our hope realiza- 
tion when we reach the goal of life, but 
then love shall begin its absolute reign in 
us. It took the sacrifice of Jesus to re- 
veal love to us (1 John 3: 16). Love is 
supreme in heaven, and through the 

220 



THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

church it is destined to dominate the 
world. 

Every material thing perishes. Is- 
lands and continents rise up in the sea 
__. , _. only to disappear, and 

Things that Dis- l a a \u 1 a 

water floods the land; 

oceans change their loca- 
tion and rivers their course; the moun- 
tains with their craggy peaks eventually 
succumb to the wearing forces of time 
and sink to the level of the valley; yea, 
the earth shall pass away, the sun shall 
go out in darkness, the moon shall be- 
come as blood, the stars shall fall as 
unripe figs, and the heaven shall be re- 
moved as a scroll when it is rolled up 
(Rev. 6: 12-14). Worldly pleasure in- 
toxicates for the moment and then be- 
comes insipid. And he who neglects the 
deep interest of his soul and chases the 
bubble of entertainment, or unleashes sen- 
suality and destroys his body as the tem- 
ple of God, bankrupts himself against the 
day of judgment (Eccl. 11:9, 10). One 
day our friends and loved ones are with 
us ; the next they are gone forever and we 
are in broken-hearted loneliness. For 
"all flesh is as grass, and all the glory 
thereof as the flower of grass" (1 Pet. 
1:24). 

221 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

"But the word of the Lord abideth 
for ever," and shall bring to immortality 
TU . ,, , .,., every one in whom it is 

Things that Abide . J J , , - . 1 . 

incarnated by faith and 
hope and love (1 John 1 : 17). And these 
principles abide because they relate to the 
unchanging Christ (Heb. 13:8): they 
are His great searchlights, flashing the 
light of heaven to earth for all genera- 
tions. No matter how long the world 
may stand or how far men may progress, 
Jesus will always be high above and far 
ahead, lifting up the race and leading 
humanity by faith in Himself as the Son 
of God and the Son of man, by the hope 
of His resurrection and by the example 
of His love. Why should we mourn, amid 
the shifting scenes of life, for the changes 
through which we pass or the temporary 
losses we sustain or for the years as they 
take their flight, seeing that we are com- 
ing to eternal life in Christ Jesus our 
Lord and King! 

Faith and hope and love are our 

legacy from the Master. And they are 

_ T ,. absolutely necessary in 

HHt * s fX this w ° rld - w * hout 

H y ° L *v ' them the Christian life 

would be impossible and 

business would be paralyzed. Men must 

222 



1THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

have confidence in one another, hope for 
earthly reward, and exercise the tolerance 
of charity. And since in the flesh we 
can neither see the Lord nor hear His 
voice nor become cognizant of the eternal 
world, how could we follow Christ with- 
out the assurance of the things for which 
we hope and the conviction of the things 
we do not see — faith, without hope that 
reaches "within the veil/' and without 
love that apprehends the invisible? (1 
Cor. 15: 19.) Jesus withdrew from the 
earth. But He left us foundation for 
faith, inspiration to hope and the perfect 
demonstration of love. 

And these principles connect us with 
Christ and God, in whom we live and 

„. . _ have our being. And by 

Their Incompar- , - , ° . , ,, J 

,, _,. , them we enter into the 

able Riches . . AT . 

church. None can have 

vital relation with the vine, without which 
the branches are dead, who reject Jesus 
of Nazareth as the Messiah, or the 
Christ, or despise the hope of God's prom- 
ises, or refuse the gifts of His love. Life 
would be intolerable without faith and 
hope and love. But it is rich and full in 
proportion as we believe in God and men, 
have holy desires and noble expectations, 
and affection to lavish on the objects of 

15 223 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

our devotion. Let us praise God for the 
guides and lights that abide. We are on 
our journey, which we are as helpless to 
stay as we are to check the moon in its 
course or to slacken the earth as it speeds 
around the sun. May the abiding prin- 
ciples be in us when we reach the end of 
the way, that we may live forever ! 

Review Questions 

181 (1) Why are faith, hope and 
love the immortal virtues ? 

182 (2) What and how was the 
purpose achieved by miracles? 

183 (3) What is the perfection of 
faith and hope and love? 

184 (4) What is the meaning of 
faith? 

185 (5) What is the source of 
faith? 

186 (6) What is the function and 
what is the object of faith? 

187 (7) What is the value and in- 
trinsic worth of hope? 

188 (8) How does it eternize 
youth? 

189 (9) How does it purify the 
heart and sharpen sight? 

190 (10) Why is love the acme of 
all virtue? 

224 



THE ABIDING PRINCIPLES 

191 (11) What shows the initiative 
and the divinity of love? 

192 (12) What are the things that 
disappear? 

193 (13) What are the things that 
abide? 

194 (14) What is the indispensabil- 
ity of faith and hope and love? 

195 (15) What is their incomparable 
riches? 



XV 

SALVATION 

SALVATION is relative, and God can 
make it absolute only as man complies 
with its terms and obeys its law. It is 
„ . . _, , . possible to be saved from 

Salvation Relative r t . . * , 1 t , 

, A , . one thing, but lost by an- 

ana Absolute 1 . . rr<1 T 

other thing. lhe Jews 
were saved from slavery in Egypt, but 
they were lost by their own wickedness 
in the wilderness. Alexander the Great, 
though victorious over all his enemies, 
fell a victim of his own lust at the early 
age of thirty-three years. The love of 
God is constant, but the human heart is 
weak and the Devil is persistent to lead us 
astray. And we must be on guard con- 
stantly lest we become neglectful of the 
life of the spirit or impenitent of our sins 
(1 Cor. 10: 1-13; 1 Pet. 5:8). 

"Salvation is of the Lord" (Jonah 2: 
9). Destruction is easy, but conservation 
is difficult. The depraved intellect of 
Satan could originate sin, but only the 
mind of Jehovah could conceive salvation. 
And here is convincing proof that the 

226 



SALVATION 



Bible is inspired. All men are conscious 

of sin, but no man ever could have in- 

, vented the remedy for sin 

p th B'bi m ^ e Word of God. No 

. ( brain but that of the Son 

of God ever could have 
known of the kingdom prepared from the 
foundation of the world (Matt. 25:34). 
Neither could it have been written of 
Jesus Christ that He was foreknown 
from eternity as the Lamb whose pre- 
cious blood would redeem sinners from 
their vain manner of life handed down 
from their fathers, save by divine revela- 
tion (1 Pet. 1: 17-20). The plan of sal- 
vation originated in the mind of God, 
who saw the end from the beginning, and 
neither the prophets nor the angels were 
able to understand it (1 Pet. 1: 10-12). 
But the Spirit that searcheth all things, 
even the deep things of God, has revealed 
unto us through the New Testament 
"things which eye saw not, and ear heard 
not, and which entered not into the heart 
of man, whatsoever things God prepared 
for them that love Him" (1 Cor. 2: 
9, 10). 

While neither men nor angels could 
have any part in designing salvation, the 
Lord has used them both in its execution. 

227 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

Temporary relief was furnished the pa- 
triarchs and the Hebrews by types and 
c . . £ . shadows and promises 

Significance of , i • <• ,1 

iL ^ . „. and prophecies of the 

the Divine Ele- • ,-n ,i u 

, . c . 4 . Saviour till the world 

ment in Salvation . r TT . 

was ripe for Him to come 
and consummate by His own life and 
death and resurrection the eternal purpose 
of the Father. And the only cause of our 
salvation from sin is the grace of God 
(Eph. 2: 1-10). Therefore, our faith 
should not stand in the wisdom of men, 
but in the power of God (1 Cor. 2: 1-5). 
And having begun our salvation, the Lord 
is able to bring us at last to perfection 
(1 Pet. 5: 10). That salvation is of God 
destroys pride (1 Pet. 5:5, 6), creates 
hope ( Rom. 8 : 24, 25 ) and inspires serv- 
ice (2 Cor. 5: 14, 15). It also warns us 
that condemnation is of the Devil (Rom. 
8: 31-38), and that whoever perishes does 
so as a matter of his own choice (Luke 
13: 1-5). It is the will of God that all 
should be saved (2 Pet. 3:9). 

But salvation is also of man. There 
is nothing that the sinner can do to merit 
_ , . . _ salvation, but there is 

Salvation and De- , , , ' , * 

much that he can do to 

accept it. The theory 

that all men are absolutely dead and help- 

228 



SALVATION 



less in sin is abhorrent to reason, opposed 
to Scripture, contradictory of fact, and 
makes the Lord responsible for the lost. 
Total depravity is the awful state of the 
Devil And if any men are in this terrible 
condition, it is because they have de- 
stroyed the manifestation of God in their 
own beings (Rom. 1: 18-32), or branded 
their own consciences as with a hot iron 
by heeding seducing spirits and doctrines 
of demons through the hypocrisy of men 
that speak lies (1 Tim. 4: 1, 2), or hard- 
ened their hearts (Heb. 4:7) against the 
gospel, the power by which God saves 
(Rom. 1: 16). The salvation of such is 
impossible, and they are responsible for 
their own doom. 

Salvation is absolutely impartial. It 
deals with all men equally and uniformly. 
., _ ,. , None can be saved who 

The Equality and .„ J ^ ,, 

TT .. . 4 . will not accept God s un- 

Umformity of , +* r . - - 

c . ^ purchasable gift of re- 

Salvation K ,. , ° . , . - 

demption by faith in the 

Saviour publicly confessed, by repentance 

of sin and by obedience to the gospel; and 

all are saved who do thus accept the gift. 

This is the sense of Peter's exhortation 

on Pentecost to "save yourselves from 

this crooked generation" (Acts 2:40), 

and of Paul's admonition to the Philip- 

229 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

pians to "work out your own salvation 
with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12). 
Mere words are easily spoken and often 
belie the heart, but action is difficult of 
performance and a criterion of character. 
Salvation demands the agreement of 
words and action in righteousness (Matt. 
7:21; 1 John 3:18-24). Faith accepts 
salvation, repentance discards sin, public 
confession enlists the believing penitent 
in the army of the Lord, and baptism 
marks his submission to the will of God. 
Salvation means transformation. But 
the sinner is active, not passive, in con- 
xs a o- version. "Be converted" 

How the Sinner , . , 

c „. ., nowhere occurs in the 

Saves Himself A . -~ . - TT 

American Revised Ver- 
sion of the New Testament; it is always 
"turn again" (Acts 3: 19). And the sin- 
ner must turn himself or be forever lost. 
Salvation is also change of heart, but no 
man's heart can be changed against his 
will. Salvation brings the saved into a 
new life, but none are born again unless 
they choose to be (John 3: 1-15). There- 
fore, the sinner saves himself by confess- 
ing with his mouth Jesus as his Lord, by 
believing in his heart that God hath 
raised Him from the dead and by calling 
on His name (Rom. 10: 1-15), and by 

230 



SALVATION 



being baptized into His death and resur- 
rection to live a new life with Him (Rom. 
6:1-11). 

Salvation is regeneration. But re- 
generation is not creation ; it is re-creation. 

„ , . God generates, or creates, 

How Salvation & , ' , , , , . 

. . . „ ,, us only once, and that in 

Achieves God's - J ' , \. .,, A , 

~ . . . n the natural birth. And 

Original Purpose TT 

He regenerates, or re- 
creates, us in Christ Jesus our Lord by 
the new birth. Salvation gives no new 
member to the body, neither does it en- 
dow the mind with any new faculty. It 
simply turns the old creation away from 
sin to righteousness, that the original 
purpose of God in creating man may be 
accomplished (Rom. 6: 12-23). Hence, 
we are new creatures in Christ, because 
He has reconciled us to God, our Creator ; 
and He leads us in a life new to the 
world, but the only life any man was ever 
created to live. Every human being is 
born immortal, with possibilities of trans- 
mutation into the spiritual kingdom of 
God, as the mineral or the plant each may 
be alchemized into the kingdom above it. 
The work of the Saviour is both de- 
structive and constructive. Jesus leads 
us away from sin by destroying the 
works of the Devil (1 John 3:8). And 

231 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

by giving us spiritual food (Heb. 5: 11- 

14; 1 Pet. 2: 1-3), by furnishing us fellow- 

» .i. ^ « j ship, saintly and divine 

Both the Body / 1 t i i i a\ j u 

A.U o • -I (1 J onn 1 : 1-4), and by 

and the Spirit v J ,. '' fU . ; 

S v d granting us a part of His 

own great work (Mark 
16: 15), he restores in us the image 
of God in which man was originally made. 
All men have souls or spirits by right of 
their creation. And salvation is the 
proper direction by the Son of God of the 
innate religious impulse. Salvation sub- 
ordinates the body to the spirit: it cruci- 
fies sin and keeps the body in bondage 
(1 Cor. 9: 26, 27) and the works of the 
flesh in chains (Gal. 5: 16-26), that the 
spirit may produce fruit unto righteous- 
ness (Heb. 12: 11) and eternal life 
(Rom. 2: 5-16). And yet salvation is of 
the body as well as of the spirit. It 
saves the body to crucify sin in it. And 
if giving up sin is like the loss of a hand 
or a foot or an eye, the whole body will 
be lost without this heroic sacrifice (Matt. 
18: 8, 9). Jesus saves the entire being — 
body and soul and spirit. And though the 
body perishes, it will be restored in the 
resurrection. 

Salvation is not a mere theory, but 
the greatest fact in history. At last the 

232 



SALVATION 



living Redeemer stood upon the earth 

(Job 19: 25), and gave His blood as the 

01 . _ only means of justification 
Salvation a Per- /r / c 01 in a , u 

feet Life (Rom * 5:8 - n )- Other 

men yearned for the ideal 
and strove to help their fellows, but it 
remained for Jesus actually to attain 
perfection and break the shackles of 
sin. The death of Christ was to reconcile 
man to God, not God to man ; and we are 
saved by His life. But His life could not 
save until it had become a fact in the his- 
tory of the world. Indeed, salvation is 
itself a life, which men could neither im- 
agine nor describe save as they saw it in 
concrete form. And nobody ever could 
have written the narratives of the Lord's 
life in the New Testament if He had not 
really lived in this world. If any man 
could keep himself free from sin from the 
beginning to the end of his life, picking 
his way through the wilderness of time 
and avoiding all pitfalls set for his feet 
by the Devil, he would save himself. But 
"all have sinned, and fall short of the 
glory of God" (Rom. 3:23), save One, 
who is the wonder of the ages and the 
Saviour of all who "draw near unto God 
through him" (Heb. 7:25). Always 
operating in harmony with reason and 

233 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

law, Jesus saves by the inspiration and 
the glory and the sinlessness of His own 
life. Salvation is not hedged in by com- 
mandments negative and positive, but it 
is the plain, simple way in which Jesus 
lived. And if we sin, He is our Advocate 
with the Father (1 John 2:1, 2) ; if we 
falter, His hand is near to steady us; if 
we are tempted, He succors us (Heb. 2: 
18) and makes the way of escape from 
the tempter (1 Cor. 10: 13); and if we 
have no righteousness, He will give us 
His (Rom. 10:4). 

Growing up "as a root out of a dry 
ground" (Isa. 53:2), coming as light in 

« , . „ the midst of great dark- 
Salvation and j ! . tt. 
_ . . ness and loving His ene- 
mies that murdered Him, 
Jesus smashed the doctrine of evolution 
and all the false theories of life. His plan 
is not "the survival of the fittest," but the 
salvation of all. He inspired the strong 
to protect the weak (Rom. 15: 1-3). The 
race has made no real progress except 
under His leadership. And involution is 
a fitter description of the history of sin 
than evolution. If humanity evolved 
from a protoplasm by growth so slow 
that only thousands of years could mark 
the degrees, how did it happen that one 

234 



SALVATION 



man, who lived amid the ignorance and 
the superstition and the wickedness of 
two millenniums ago, suddenly reached 
the very acme of life, so that no other, 
however long the world may stand, can 
ever hope to equal Him ! And if this man 
Jesus Christ never lived, how are we to 
account for the love, His love, that is des- 
tined to drive hatred out of the hearts of 
men and weld the fragments of the race 
into one common brotherhood ! 

Salvation is a blessed experience. No 
man can be saved without knowing it. 

_ . . , _ The natural birth is un- 
Salvation the Be- • , , .^ 

, n . . conscious, but without 

ginning of Chris- • ^ 

,. „ consciousness there can 

tian Experience « . . - ~ , 

be no new birth. Salva- 
tion results from the sinner's co-operation 
with the Lord. No one can be saved in 
his own way: he must accept the Sa- 
viour's way or be lost, not because the 
Lord is arbitrary, but because no sinner 
knows how to be saved. The Spirit of God 
has revealed by frequent repetition in the 
New Testament that the primary steps of 
salvation are faith, repentance, confession 
and baptism; and when the sinner takes 
these steps the Holy Spirit bears witness 
with his spirit that he is saved from his 
past sins (Rom. 8: 16). Since a man be- 

235 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 

comes a Christian by believing with his 
whole heart in Jesus Christ, by turning 
away from the sinful life, by confessing 
the Saviour before men and by being bap- 
tized, everybody should know as surely 
whether he is a Christian or not as 
whether he is an Odd Fellow or not. But 
the spiritual life originates and grows like 
the physical life, and every follower of 
Jesus must begin as a babe (1 Pet. 1:2). 
And none can have a Christian experience 
till he has lived the Christian life. 

Hence, salvation is a process. Faith, 
which expressed itself primarily by re- 
,tm- t i- . « pentance and confession 

The Infinite Pos- F , , ,. 

...... , and baptism, must en- 

sibihties of , . "\ . , , 

e . s large into virtue and 

Salvation , & 1 , , , r 

knowledge and self-con- 
trol and patience and godliness and 
brotherly kindness and love, or there is 
no "entrance into the eternal kingdom 
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" 
(2 Pet. 1:5-11). But, with these ele- 
ments, faith becomes perfect to forecast 
the future and to reveal the infinite pos- 
sibilities of salvation, beyond the power 
of the natural heart to understand. And 
our full salvation can not yet be seen, 
though we rejoice in it by faith (1 Pet. 
1 : 3-12). 

236 



SALVATION 



Salvation is a glorious outlook. It 
was a prospect with Paul at the end of 
A „ . . his earthly career (2 Tim. 

^StaSL 4:6 - 8 >- And J° hn de - 

clared : "We know that, if 
he shall be manifested, we shall be like 
him ; for we shall see him as he is" ( 1 John 
3:2). The vision of His glory will be 
more wonderful than the world when it 
came fresh from the hand of God and 
"the morning stars sang together, and all 
the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 
38:7). And the place into which He 
will welcome us will be more beautiful 
than Eden, carpeted with velvety green, 
watered by the river of life, stirred by 
the zephyrs of heaven and echoing the 
voice of God. No prophet or poet can 
picture man at his best and in the pres- 
ence of the Lord. But John satisfies the 
heart by proclaiming that "we shall be 
like him." We shall have His attributes. 
He is omnipresent, and so shall we be. 
Mary's kindly deed of anointing His body 
for burial made her known everywhere 
(Mark 14:3-9). He is omniscient, and 
so shall we be. Paul declared that the 
time would come when he should know 
fully, even as he was fully known ( 1 Cor. 
13: 12). He is omnipotent, and so shall 

237 



THE GLORIOUS GOSPEL 



we be. His strength will make us power- 
ful to do all things (John 14: 12; Phil. 
4:13). 

It will be more marvelous to see Him 
as He is than Mt. Sinai when Jehovah 

„. _ , „ touched the summit in the 

His second Com- • -, , r r j i 

. . rxwnzz midst of fire and smoke 

mg of Time anc * n & ntnm g an d thun- 

der; more terrible than 
the fiery furnace heated so intensely that 
the soldiers who threw the children of 
Israel into it were themselves consumed; 
more awful than the den of lions into 
which Daniel was thrown, and where the 
angel of the Lord guarded through the 
dark hours of the night; more glorious 
than the transfiguration of Jesus, when 
Moses and Elijah returned from the dead 
and the Son of God was clothed in the 
habiliments of the sky; and more inter- 
esting than the ascension, when a cloud 
received Christ out of sight as He rode 
in a radiant chariot into heaven. Yea, 
His second coming will be the greatest 
of all events and the climax of time. And 
it will be the same to the sleeping as to 
the waking (1 Cor. 15:50-52; 1 Thess. 
4: 13-18), marking the entrance of all 
faithful disciples into the fullness and joy 
and glory of His presence. 

238 



SALVATION 



Review Questions 

196 (1) Why is salvation relative 
and absolute ? 

197 (2) How does salvation prove 
the Bible inspired? 

198 (3) What is the significance of 
the divine element in salvation? 

199 (4) How does the consideration 
of salvation and depravity show that sal- 
vation is also of man ? 

200 (5) What proves the equality 
and uniformity of salvation? 

201 (6) How does the sinner save 
himself? 

202 (7) How does salvation achieve 
God's original purpose? 

203 (8) How are both the body and 
the spirit saved? 

204 (9) Why is salvation a perfect 
life? 

205 (10) How does salvation affect 
the doctrine of evolution? 

206 (11) How is salvation the begin- 
ning of Christian experience? 

207 (12) What are the infinite pos- 
sibilities of salvation? 

208 (13) Why and when are all the 
saved to be like Jesus? 

209 (14) Why will His second com- 
ing be the climax of time? 

m 239 



INDEX 

A 

PAGE 

Abraham — The Germ of the Jewish and the 
Christian Dispensation in the Promise to 
Abraham 59 

Antiquity — How Antiquity Converged in Need 

of Him (Jesus) 124 

Apostasy — Disloyalty to the Spirit's Message 

Causes Apostasy 142 

Apostles — (See Contents of Chapter X.) 152-166 

Authoritative — The Old Testament Not Au- 
thoritative Now 50 

Authority — And Surrendered Its Authority in 

Fulfillment m 85 

Authority — Based on Love as Authority, It 
(the Great Commission) Proves Its Orig- 
inator Divine 172 

Authority of Truth 23 

B 

Baptism — How to Settle the Question of Bap- 
tism 199 

Baptism — Significance of the Baptism of Jesus. 196 

Baptism Suits Action of Body to Penitence of 

Spirit 200 

Baptism — The Divine Principle and Unique 

Relation of Baptism 198 

Baptized — Why They (the Apostles) Were 

Baptized of the Holy Spirit 160 

Beginnings — Contrast of Their (the Testa- 
ments') Beginnings 47 

Body— Both the Body and the Spirit Saved... 232 

Body— The Spirit and the Body 137 

Bible— All Bible Roads Lead to Him (Jesus) . 125 
Bible — How Salvation Proves the Bible In- 
spired 227 

241 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Bible — Religion the Fundamental Purpose of 

the Bible 67 

Bible — The Hemispheres of the Bible 40 

Bible— (See Contents of Chapter I.) 27-39 

C 

Cause — How Jehovah Saved His Cause 57 

Center of the Old Testament 42 

Christ— Moses Mediator of the Old (Testa- 
ment), Christ of the New 44 

Christ — Salvation Fully Wrought Out in Christ 63 

Christ — The Church Is for the Universal Mani- 
festation of Christ 186 

Christ — The Holy Spirit Related to Christ as 

Christ to God 142 

Christ — The Imperishable Monuments of Christ 196 

Christ the Only Foundation 13 

Christ — The Secret of Their (the Apostles') 

Power 157 

Christian— It (the Gospel) Is the Only Salva- 
tion for the Sinner and Hope for the Chris- 
tian 176 

Christian — It (the Lord's Supper) Is for the 

Spiritual Welfare of the Christian . . . . . 204 

Christian — Simple Embodiment of Christian 

Principles 71 

Christianity — The Fundamentals of Christian- 
ity. (See Contents of Introduction.) ... ; . . 13-25 

Christianity — The Superiority of Christianity 

over Other Religions 70 

Church— (See Contents of Chapter XII.) 181-195 

Church — How the Great Commission Saves 

the Church 175 

Church — Its Challenge Will Bring Victory 

When Heeded by the Whole Church 178 

Church— The Church Is the Body of the Holy 

Spirit 146 

Commission, The Great — (See Contents of 

Chapter XI.) 167-180 

Communicant — And (the Lord's Supper) 
Blesses the Communicant with Self-knowl- 
edge : .. 205 

Communion — And the Most Direct Communion 

with Jesus 206 

242 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Conclusion — Contrast of Their (Testaments') 

Conclusion 49 

Constitutions — The Difference in Their (Tes- 
taments') Constitutions 45 

Contracts — 'God's Contracts with Men 41 

Cure — The Only Cure for This Paralysis (Sin) 187 

Cure — The Specific Cure for the Disease of Sin 99 

D 

Day — The Occasion of the Lord's Day 207 

Day — The Privilege of the Lord's Day vs. the 

Restriction of the Sabbath 208 

Day — The Superiority of the Lord's Day 209 

Dealing — Divine Dealing with Man Originally 

Direct 53 

Depravity — Salvation and Depravity 228 

Development — Contrast of Their (Testa- 
ments') Development 48 

Devil— The Actuality of the Devil 96 

Devil— "The Works of the Devil" 97 

Devil — Sin Always Manacled to the Devil, Its 

Begetter 102 

Disease — The Specific Cure for the Disease of 

Sin 99 

Disease — Symptoms of the Disease of Sin 101 

Dispensations — (See Contents of Chapter III.) 53-66 
Divine — Significance of the Divine Element in 

Salvation 228 

Divinity — The Inscrutability of the Gospel 

Proves Its Divinity 117 

Doctrine and Life 20 

Doctrine and Operations of the Church 194 

E 

Enlarged — How God Enlarged His Dispensa- 
tion 60 

Enlargement — The Jewish Dispensation En- 
largement of the Patriarchal 58 

Essential — Salvation His (Jesus') Essential 

Work , 133 

Evolution — Salvation and Evolution 234 

Excellence — Jesus Is the Acme of Excellence.. 128 
Experience — Salvation the Beginning of Chris- 
tian Experience 235 

243 



INDEX 



F 



PAGE 



Faith— The Function and Object of Faith 215 

Faith — The Indispensability of Faith, Hope and 

Love 222 

Faith — Their Incomparable Riches 223 

Faith— The Meaning of Faith 214 

Faith — The Perfection of Faith, Hope and 

Love 213 

Faith— The Source of Faith 214 

Faith — Their (Apostles') Testimony the Foun- 
dation of Our Faith 157 

Finite — And (the Bible) Leads the Finite to 

the Infinite 37 

Flesh— The Flesh Enthralled by Sin 103 

Freedom — The Gospel the Only Guarantee of 

Freedom 90 

G 

God — And (the Great Commission) Announces 

the Rich Provision of God for All 171 

God — And God Made Him Lord and Christ... 132 

God — He (Jesus) Is the Union of God and 

Man 127 

God — How God Enlarged His Dispensation ... 60 

God — How Salvation Achieves God's Original 

Purpose 231 

God — Law Is the Will of God, Inherent and 

Merciful 81 

God Revealed His Law as Man's Well-being 

Demanded 82 

God— The Holy Spirit Related to Christ as 

Christ to God 142 

Gospel— (See Contents of Chapter VII.) 108-121 

Gospel — Contrast of the Law and the Gospel.. 86 

Gospel — The Gospel the Only Guarantee of 

Freedom 90 

Gospel — The Gospel the Supreme Law of Life. 87 

H 

Happiness — Love the Only Safeguard of Life 

and Happiness 91 

Heaven and Hell Defined by Contrast 96 

244 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Hell as Spiritual Doom Imaged by Physical 

Suffering 98 

(Hope) And Purifies the Heart and Sharpens 

Sight 217 

(Hope) It Eternizes Youth 217 

Hope — The Indispensability of Faith, Hope and 

Love 222 

Hope — Their Incomparable Riches 223 

Hope — The Perfection of Faith, Hope and 

Love 213 

Hope — The Rational Testimony of the Holy 

Spirit the Foundation of Hope 145 

Hope— The Value of Hope 216 

I 

Ideal— The Cost of the Ideal of the Church. . . 184 

Incarnation — Timeliness of His Incarnation 125 

Infinite — And Leads the Finite to the Infinite.. 37 
Israel — The Law of Moses also Adapted to 

Israel 83 

Inscrutability of the Gospel Proves Its Divinity 117 
Inspired — How Salvation Proves the Bible In- 
spired 227 

J 

Jehovah — How Jehovah Saved His Cause 57 

Jerusalem — The Model Church in Jerusalem.. 185 

Jesus of Nazareth — (See Contents of Chapter 

VIII.) 122-136 

Jesus — All the Saved to Be Like Jesus 237 

Jesus — And the Most Direct Communion with 

Jesus 206 

Jesus — Completion of the Work of Jesus in 

Them (Apostles) by the Holy Spirit 158 

Jesus — His Second Coming the Climax of 

Time 238 

Jesus — How Jesus Safeguards His Against 

Forgetting Him 202 

Jesus — How the Lord's Supper Evinces His 

Life 203 

Jesus — Significance of the Baptism of Jesus... 196 

Jesus— The Holy Spirit Judges the World by 

the Word of Jesus 144 

Jesus the Master of All Law 89 

245 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Jesus — The Necessity for Competent Witnesses 

of Jesus 152 

Jesus — The Supremacy of Jesus 17 

Jesus — Why the Ministry of Jesus Limited to 

the Jews 167 

Jewish Dispensation Enlargement of the Patri- 
archal 58 

K 

Keys — And (the Gospel) Proves and Keys the 

Supernatural 115 

Kingdom — Why the Church Could Not Exist 

Till Pentecost 182 

Knowledge — And (the Lord's Supper) Blesses 

the Communicant with Self-knowledge 205 

L 

Labor — And (the Church Organized for) the 

Proper Division of Labor 190 

Law— (See Contents of Chapter V.) 80-93 

Lawless, Sin Slays Its Victim unless Slain 

Itself 106 

Leader — The Patriarch the Natural Leader. . . 54 

Life — Doctrine and Life 20 

Life — Religion Conserves Life and Equalizes 

Men 73 

Life — Religion the Dominant Element in Life. 76 

Life— Salvation a Perfect Life 233 

Life — The Gospel the Story of the World's 

Greatest Life 112 

Life — Triangles of Life 22 

Likeness Demands Union 14 

Limit — Time Limit of Each Dispensation 63 

Love — And (the Lord's Supper) Refreshes Us 

with His Love 203 

Love — Based on Love as Authority, It (the 

Great Commission) Proves Its Originator 

Divine 172 

Love the Acme of All Virtue 218 

Love — The Indispensability of Faith, Hope and 

Love 222 

Love — Their Incomparable Riches 223 

Love — The Initiative and the Divinity of Love 219 

240 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Love the Only Safeguard of Life and Happi- 
ness 91 

Love — The Perfection of Faith, Hope and 

Love 213 

M 

Man — Divine Dealing with Man Originally Di- 
rect 53 

Man — He (Jesus) Is the Union of God and 

Man 127 

Man — Jesus Is Forever the Son of Man 134 

Man's — God Revealed His Law as Man's Well- 
being Demanded 82 

Man's— The Gospel Born of Man's Original 

Likeness to God. 109 

Master— Jesus the Master of All Law 89 

Men — God's Contracts with Men 41 

Men — Religion Conserves Life and Equalizes 

Men 73 

Men— The First Need of Men 23 

Method — The Great Commission Wisely Pre- 
scribes No Method of Procedure 177 

Miracle — The Gospel Is the Miracle of Mira- 
cles 114 

Miracles — The Purpose of Miracles Achieved. 212 

Moses Mediator of the Old (Testament), 

Christ of the New 44 

Mystery — Both Simplicity and Mystery Inhere 

in the Gospel 116 

N 

Necessity for Competent Witnesses of Jesus . . 152 
Need — (The Bible) Sufficient unto Human 

Need 31 

Need— The First Need of Men 23 

Neglect — The Church Paralyzed by Neglect 

and Schism 186 

News — The Good News of the Gospel 120 

O 

Object— The Function and the Object of Faith. 215 

Objective — Religion Objective and Subjective. 16 

Obstacle — Sin as an Obstacle 21 

247 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Occasion of the Lord's Day 207 

Operations — The Doctrine and Operations of 

the Church 194 

Organized — The Church Organized for Care 

and Conquest 188 

Organized — (The Church Organized for) And 

the Proper Division of Labor 190 

Origin of Sin, The 95 

Original— The Gospel Born of Man's Original 

Likeness to God 109 

Originally — Divine Dealing with Man Origi- 
nally Direct 53 

Overcome — How (Sin) Overcome 21 

Outlook for the Future, The 64 

P 

Paralysis — The Only Cure for This Paralysis. 187 

Patriarch the Natural Leader 54 

Patriarchal — Simplicity of the Patriarchal Dis- 
pensation 54 

Patriarchal — The Adequacy of the Patriarchal 

Dispensation 55 

Patriarchal — Where It (the Patriarchal Dispen- 
sation) Broke Down 56 

Pentecost — Why the Church Could Not Exist 

Till Pentecost 182 

Perfection— The Fate of His (Jesus') Perfec- 
tion 130 

Perfection — The Perfection of Faith, Hope 

and Love 213 

Preach — Why No Commission to Preach the 

Holy Spirit 138 

Preacher's — The Gospel Always the Preacher's 

Theme 118 

Primacy — The Absolute, Eternal Primacy of 

the Twelve Apostles 163 

Priority of Jesus 123 

Promise — The Germ of the Jewish and the 
Christian Dispensation in the Promise to 
Abraham 59 

Proves — And (the Gospel) Proves and Keys 

the Supernatural 115 

248 



INDEX 



R PAGE 

Records of the Great Commission, The Five.. 168 

Religion— (See Contents of Chapter IV.).... 67-79 

Religion Natural and Supernatural 15 

Religion Objective and Subjective 16 

Religious — (The Bible) Supremely Religious . . 32 
Revealed— God Revealed His Law as Man's 

Well-being Demanded 82 

Roads— All Bible Roads Lead to Him (Jesus) . 125 

S 

Sabbath — The Privilege of the Lord's Day vs. 

the Restriction of the Sabbath 208 

Sacred — And (Religion) Will Make Every- 
thing Sacred and Nothing Secular 77 

Salvation— (See Contents of Chapter XV.)... 226-239 

Salvation Fully Wrought Out in Christ 63 

Salvation Is His (Jesus') Essential Work 133 

Salvation — It (the Great Commission) Is the 
Only Salvation for the Sinner and Hope 

for the Christian 176 

Saved — How Jehovah Saved His Cause 57 

Saved — How the Gospel Saves 118 

Saved— The Saved Are Born, Not "Joined," 

into the Church 191 

Saves — How the Great Commission Saves the 

Church 175 

Scriptures — He (Jesus) Is the Correlative of 

the Holy Scriptures 126 

Schism — The Church Paralyzed by Neglect and 

Schism 186 

Self-mastery — Because It (Religion) Develops 

Self-mastery 75 

Serve — His (Jesus') Passion Was to Serve... 131 

Service — The Glorious Service of the Church. 192 

Sight — And (Hope) Purifies the Heart and 

Sharpens Sight ...... ; 317 

Simplicity — Both Simplicity and Mystery In- 
here in the Gospel 116 

Sin— (See Contents of Chapter VI.) 94-107 

Sin as an Obstacle 21 

(Sin) — How Overcome 21 

Sin — The Gospel God's Plan to Destroy Sin 

and Save the Sinner 108 

249 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Sin — The Sin Against the Holy Spirit 147 

Spirit, The Holy — (See Contents of Chapter 

IX.) 137-151 

Spirit — Baptism Suits Action of Body to Peni- 
tence of Spirit 200 

Spirit — Completion of the Work of Jesus in 

Them (Apostles) by the Holy Spirit 158 

Spirit— "The Gift of the Holy Spirit" 161 

Spirit — Why They (Apostles) Were Baptized 

of the Holy Spirit 160 

Subjective — Religion Objective and Subjective. 16 

Supernatural — And (the Gospel) Proves and 

Keys the Supernatural 115 

Supper — And (the Lord's Supper) Blesses the 

Communicant with Self-knowledge 205 

Supper — And Refreshes Us with His Love 203 

Supper — And the Most Direct Communion 

with Jesus 206 

Supper — How the Lord's Supper Evinces His 

Life 203 

Supper — It Is for the Spiritual Welfare of the 

Christian 204 

Symbolized — 'The First Two Dispensations 

Symbolized the Third 61 

T 

Temptation — Religion Counteracts Temptation 74 

Testaments — (See Contents of Chapter II.)... 40-52 
Testament — The Holy Spirit Operates Through 

the New Testament 139 

Testament— Vitality of the New Testament... 19 
Testament— Which He Himself (the Holj 

Spirit) Inspired 140 

Testament — Why the Holy Spirit Is a New 

Testament Revelation 148 

Testament— Why the Old Testament Had No 

Church 181 

Theme — The Gospel Always the Preacher's 

Theme 118 

Themes — Primary Themes 18 

Things that Abide 222 

Things that Disappear 221 

Time — His (Jesus') Second Coming the Cli 

max of Time 238 

250 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Timeliness of His Incarnation 125 

Truth— The Authority of Truth 23 

Truth— Why All Truth Focuses in Jesus 122 

U 

Unfolded— It (the Great Commission) Is the 
New Covenant Unfolded by Acts and the 
Epistles < 174 

Uniformity — The Equality and Uniformity of 

Salvation 229 

Union — He (Jesus) Is the Union of God and 

Man 127 

Union — Likeness Demands Union 14 

V 

Value of Hope, The 216 

Vehicle of Thought Common to the Dispensa- 
tions 62 

Victory — Its (the Great Commission's) Chal- 
lenge Will Bring Victory When Heeded by 

the Whole; Church 178 

Victory — The Only Absolute Victory over Sin. 104 

Virtue — Love the Acme of All Virtue 218 

Virtues — The Immortal Virtues 211 

W 

Word— (The Bible) The Word of God and 

Source of All Good 30 

Word — The Holy Spirit Intelligible in the 

Word of God 141 

Work — Salvation Is His (Jesus') Essential 

Work 133 

"Works of the Devil" 97 

World— (The Bible) Complete Guide for This 

World 36 

World— Sin Is the Blight of the World 94 

Y 
Youth— It (Hope) Eternizes Youth 217 



251 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: July 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



